Moby-Dick could have been just a great sea yarn, but...

As many others have noted, the greatness of Melville's "Moby-Dick" is its unevenness - it's a baggy compendium of so many styles and genres and techniques that it gives the illusion of containing the vastness of the world, or at least of the ocean. On this rereading its more obvious to me how it's an ancestor of Ulysses, in that Melville is willing to bring form and experiment with different narrative techniques (the script-like scenes in which the many whalemen, each from a different culture, speak their minds is the obvious inspiration for Nighttown). Melville switches from a catalog of legends about dangerous whales and whaling voyages, the book threatening to become a nonfiction tract, to the strange appearance on deck, after months of voyage?, of the five Asian whalemen whom Ahab has sneaked on board and kept like stowaways in the hold until the first whale siting - Ishmael had seen intimations of this secret crew, but their appearance on deck is startling and strange. What do they signify? Books have been written about that I'm sure. On the most literal level the dark forces of anger and revenge that Ahab has kept barely repressed and that he prepares to unleash against his nemisis. On another level - a kind of imprisonment or enslavement - for who are they and why would the consent to being kept in the hold for weeks or months? How did Ahab arrange to compensate them? There's something bestial and sadistic about the relationship, the episode. I was surprised - I didn't remember at all - that Starbuck's whaleboat is crushed during the squall and fog in the first "lowering" - a great piece of maritime narrative - as Melville shows his expertise at the popular side of the genre. Yes, Moby-Dick could have been simply a great sea yarn - but he saw so much more and was so much more ambitious and visionary