The most disconcerting chapter in Moby-Dick

Great novels can be greatly bad (at times), too, and maybe none more than Melville's "Moby-Dick," which aside from the occasionally impenetrable Biblical prose and the eye-numbing compendia of information about whales also includes one incredibly racist and disconcerting chapter, Stubb's Dinner (Supper?). Even in its badness it's great, however, as it shows the enormous reach of Meliville's imagination and ambitions. But in this chapter, Stubb wakes the cook (Fleece), a black man - says he's 90 years old ! - to cut him a whalesteak and cook it for his dinner. Then he berates the cook for overcooking the steak - he wants it rare - and then has the cook preach a "sermon" over the gunwales of the ship, imploring the sharks (devouring the whale carcass) to make less noise. This chapter recalls Huck Finn at its worst, with white men taunting the black man simply because they can do so - nothing at all funny about it, except perhaps the dignity and flash of sly humor from Fleece, but you have to suspect that Melville put this chapter in for what he thought of as low comedy - made all the more powerful and terrifying by what's going on alongside the Pequod, the sharks thrashing in the bloody water, gouging strangely globular hunks of flesh from the carcass. I'm sure there is a deeper layer of meaning - the sharks like the horrors of life of man on earth, killing one another for survival, and a voice from above calling for peace and good will - essays, books, have probably been written on this - but it still makes us uncomfortable (today) - and forces us to grapple with the difficulties of this novel in ways few of the other chapters do.