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Why does the narrator in Moby-Dick include digressions and various subject references?

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The narrator in Moby-Dick includes digressions and various subject references to align with the nineteenth-century tradition of providing explanatory digressions that connect themes to broader human experiences. Melville's extensive descriptions serve as metaphors for humanity's quest for the infinite, mirroring Ahab's obsession with the whale. Additionally, these digressions educate and entertain readers while establishing the narrator's authority, enhancing the depth and credibility of his observations throughout the novel.

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Nineteenth-century fiction writers often tended self-consciously to provide the reader with long, explanatory digressions on the themes of their novels. It's as if it was not enough for them to allow the fictional narrative to speak for itself. Often such long, expository chapters have the purpose of tying the disparate themes of a novel together and didcatically showing how they relate to humanity in general, to fate, and to other all-encompasing subjects. Tolstoy does this in the two epilogues to War and Peace, in which he deals with, among other things, the question of historical inevitability and how it relates to the panorama of war shown in the novel.

Melville, however, seems to take this practice of essay -writing within a novel to an extreme. The obsessive and minute descriptions of whales and whaling seem almost deliberately exaggerated, a scholarly analogue to Ahab's obsession. One tends to view the whale...

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fixation as the main point of the entire novel, but this in itself is ametaphor. It's as if man's search for the impossible, his quest for something beyond the mundane—stated on the very first page when Ishmael tells us his cure for "hypo" is to seek the open sea—is symbolized by the whale, but the whale, and man's relationship to it, then needs to be explained in a vast commentary showing a myriad of facts. The length of the commentary is then another metaphor, one representing theinfinite, which man—in this case, the nineteenth-century writer, with his typical obsession over that which exists beyond this world—seeks again and again to grasp and come to terms with.

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The simplest reason that Melville included such digressions is that they were common in period novels. To expand on that a bit more, in a society before television, radio, or other broadcast media, books and newspapers played multiple roles. Novels like Moby Dick gave descriptions of these topics to educate readers, and to entertain them, as a travelogue might.

They also build the narrator's authority. Rather than just being a whaler/sailor, who has a single profession, he's someone who can discourse on many topics. This lends weight to any of his observations about character in the novel.

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