Call him Ishmael, the strangest of narrators - Moby-Dick

Taking the occasion of traveling to Nantucket to re-read "Mob-Dick," or at least the first section of it - don't know for sure if I'll reread the whole novel, but it opens up like no other book ever, a monument, an exhibit A for the case that the greatest of novels are a world unto themselves, that te greatest novels belie the principle, generally valid, tat a work of art (like a machine) should have no unnecessary parts (Strunk & White, q.v.) - the greatest novels are filled with unnecessary parts, or strictly unnecessary - but needed in the greater sense of establishing a voice and a mood. Melville opens Moby-Dick (I'd forgotten this) with several pages of quotations from literature, the Bible, sea logs, ballads - about whales, Leviathans, also a few paragraphs about the etymology of "whale." Why is this necessary? Only to establish that this novel is greater than a novel, it's a compendium of all knowledge on this strange and doomed subject. The first chapter, after the famously diect opening sentence, is strangely meandering and speculative, Ishmael discoursing on why all people are drawn to the sea and to water, then to his own peculiarities - he's not even sure why he signs on to a whaling ship, but he's a misfit, a wanderer, an obsessive and eccentric - yes people are drawn to the sea but not as he is, to run away from their own melancholy, he seems to have no family, no connection to society, and a totally unlikely narrator (as I recall his personality becomes less significant to the novel as the story unfolds) - but also establishes this as a truly American voice, heading away from civilization and not enclasped by it - a key, the key, difference between British and American fiction of the 19th century. But Melville's voice unique in many ways - to look at later.