Melville - Browne - Sebald : The boundaries between essay and fiction

Three chapters toward the middle of "Moby-Dick" are monuments in themselves - perfect examples of miniature essays, fully capturing the strange mood of the novel and the unique narrative voice that Melville established. The Brit, Squid, and The Line: The Brit (not short for British, but descriptive of the krill or seafoam floating on the surface of the Pacific and consumed in great gulps by the slowmoving right whales, who leave a trail of blue behind as the cut through the yellow krill), Squid describing the giant squid that bobs up and down, an island of white, rarely seen and an ill omen; the line describing the rope that links to the harpoon and how it's made and how it coiled on the whaleboats and from that expanding to a view of the universe and man's fate, each of us surrounded by a line that can snap us off to death at any single moment. I;m sure these three chapters appear separately in anthologies - they ought to, they would be great for teaching. I was not surprised at all to see that Melville took one of his chapter title form Sir Thoman Browne; his essayist style heavily influenced by Brown (British, 17th century?), who wrote strange meandering essays about commonplaces of English life, such as burial urns, and used these as gateways that opened for him on to vast explorations of faith and fate. Browne is Melville's antecedent, and is descendant, I would say, is the late great W.S. Sebold, whose nearly unique fiction was built on essays and observations (plus photos) of the detritus of life: ruins, abandoned buildings and neighborhoods, spaces of desolation. A Brit, an American, a German.