Everything we look for in fiction but nothing we expect: Moby-Dick

You can see why the first readers of "Moby-Dick" would scratch their heads in wonder. What's this, a whole chapter (Cetology) on the types of whales, arranged into some weird categories comparing whales with the sizes of published books (folio, octo, etc.)? And all of these chapters written by a supposed member of a whaling crew, about whom we know virtually nothing, but who somehow is full of Biblical quotation, mythical allusion, and incantatory, eccentric prose? What kind of book is this? But for us today, on every reading and rereading, we see that it's a book of such vast scope and ambition that by necessity (and design?) it has to be flawed, rough, and incomplete - thus the passage at the end of the Cetology chapter that even the footnote recognizes as famous in which Melville/Ishmael calls this novel a draught (draft) of a draft, for lack of time, cash, health, strength (I think those 4 things) - something with which every writer can identify. So we don't read Moby-Dick if we want a good whale yarn, a good story, a character who grows and unfolds over time - those things we usually get from a novel - it is an anti-novel, in some ways - particularly in that it does have all of these things: plenty of good stories within it (though none cohere into a single line of plot), very striking and memorable characters (though none grown and change), great writing (that sometimes breaks apart under its own weight); a sense of place (though completely removed from the world that most of us know - the antecedent of starship sagas, perhaps); information about the world in which we live (though a vanished world even in its time and told with such peculiar empahses as to seem unreliable, fact mixed with legend and comical exagerration) - everything we look for in fiction but nothing we expect from it.