199 words about Moby Dick

Call me maybe.

I never knew how Moby Dick ended. This seems crazy, now that I do know. How is this not all anyone knows about Moby Dick? I knew something of the journey to get there — “Call me Ishmael,” of course, followed by long, ostensibly punishing passages about ship etiquette and knot techniques. I did not know that said passages were written with an almost psychedelic exuberance — that invented typologies of whales burst with invented adjectives; that the book, in its churning succession of short, hyper-specific chapters, has the ceaseless ebb of the high seas in its very structure; that the whole thing, you realize eventually, is more a piece of nonfiction composed as if it were cosmic horror, in which there are obviously characters but the primary character and protagonist is the concept and practice of whaling and that it contains within it all the terror and lust of human existence. The antagonist is not the whale. The antagonist is you, reader. You have been getting off too easy out here, “reading.” Moby Dick doesn’t show up until the final 20 pages, but they are about as good as pages get. You end up exactly as had been predestined: consumed.