A Modern Epic: Moby Dick and the Importance of Metafiction Anonymous College

Moby Dick is not a story-driven book, but one that delves deeply into subjects such as fate, presence of God in daily life, and reading. Melville, a progressive and innovative writer, deploys the idea of reading and interoperation into every little nook and cranny found in the book. The scars on the whale and Queequeg’s tattoos can be deciphered like hieroglyphs, while every character in the book struggles to represent himself: Ishmael embarks on long rants in chapters like Cetology while Captain Ahab condemns himself for being unable to express what draws him to the White Whale. The effect of these two traits render Moby Dick as something that is to be uniquely discovered and interpreted by a reader. In a way, Moby Dick is neither an epic or a book, but a massive allegory that sits comfortably between these two categories of literature, effectively a defining American work of metafiction.

The metafiction in Moby Dick is apparent when the narrator, Ishmael, breaks the forth wall to address the reader directly, and explain the foggy nineteenth century cetology. The middle section of the novel, detailing the inner workings of the whale, serve two realistic purposes. First, the way Ishmael directly takes up this obscure branch of...