How on earth did Moby Dick become so popular? I can't imagine a reader in the early 1900s picking up an old copy of Moby Dick, reading it, and then thinking, "This is fantastic! I must tell all of my friends to read it!" Even taking into account the fact that many readers of Moby Dick during that time period identified with the story, how did it ever gain enough popularity to be so widely referenced? And how has its popularity endured into our time?
I know a lot of people who do not have the attention span to read a Jane Austen novel. How would our generation ever connect with Moby Dick enough to press forward through the hundreds of pages with no plot to get to the end of the story?
And yet, even though most of us have not read Moby Dick, we all know the basic story. I am fascinated by that. What is it about Moby Dick that persists through the years?
My personal opinion is that people like the idea of the story more than the story itself. After all, a story about a revenge-obsessed captain chasing a white whale sounds rather exciting. I think that it is this idea of Moby Dick that captures people's imaginations. The reality of Moby Dick, including the hundreds of pages of descriptions of blubber and whale skulls, doesn't matter to most of the general population. I believe that we have created our own version of Moby Dick, one that we can relate to, and decided that the details of the original are irrelevant.
What do you think? Do you have any ideas about how Moby Dick is still so popular over 100 years after it was originally published?
Well, Moby-Dick is considered classic literature, so it gets talked about and parodied like other classic novels. Apart from that i don't really know. I think it has to do with the fact that it's an adventure story: cool things happen.
ReplyDeleteBut I am more interested in your idea of how popular culture has compressed the 1000-page original Moby-Dick into a more manageable story. Does this have something to do with how people in general manage reality? Do people take a larger concept and compress it into a smaller summary with a few favorite details?