Shower Thoughts
I finished Moby Dick last weekend, taking a couple months to read it, going slowly until it really swept me up for the last couple hundred pages.
This morning I'm taking my shower and thinking about it. Specifically, the title. Moby Dick, or The Whale.
This kind of naming convention is something I've always thought was an old time way of naming. I remember seeing it in the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons when I was a kid, and other media made before I was born, like Dr Strangelove. I never really thought of it too hard, I just accepted it as an anachronism.
But that isn't really the case here, is it?
Moby Dick, or The Whale.
Is this book about Moby Dick, the most feared leviathan of the seas? Or is it about The Whale, a creature that has its own intelligence but doesn't know that it has a name granted by some land dwelling mammals. It doesn't spend any of its time thinking about ships and captains unless they're trying to kill it with harpoons. It's just...a whale. Like Starbuck says.
The title was sitting in front of me, doing some narrative framing all this time.
This book is so much fun to think about.