“The most substantial of Moby-Dick’s boring parts are the ‘cetology chapters,’ widely acknowledged as the chapters that ‘story lovers love to skip’” (Doyle 2). Moby Dick begins with attention grabbing chapters that lure readers in, such as the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg and Ahab losing his leg; both of which have plots that are fascinating. Readers do not expect a relationship between two men to be written about in the nineteenth century, and so the audience becomes curious and actually reads to find out what kind of acts they performed in that time between two racially different men and also compare a homosexual relationship today. Then Ahab has this obsession over a large white sperm whale (Moby Dick) and feels the need …show more content…
The plot is what hooks readers to the book, not the science aspect of it. What the character finds interesting, readers find boring and vice versa, so this relationship causes a conflict in which the character will express interesting facts about whales but be completely ignored by the audience, and when he describes the dangerous voyage he has the attention of those individuals. The character is fascinated more in his love for whales instead of what readers think and that, the audience do not appreciate. The reader’s interests, which is the great battle they expect to read about, constitutes the boredom of the character. This novel is unique in the way that both sides (the narrator and the readers) have their own way of reading the book; one side rather skip what happens with the relationship with Queequeg and the voyage to get to the science of it all while the other wants to skip the informative and thought-provoking sections to get to the action. Overall, what one defines as “boring” will be captivating for another, therefore it is essential to understand the reason why it is the way it is and not argue against it because at the end, everyone stands with what they like and that is what the beauty of the novel is; everyone is subject to their own