A brief note on the greatness of Moby-Dick (as if I were the first to note this?)

Can there be any doubt that "Moby-Dick" is the great American novel? And yet: how can we explain it? Wherein lies its greatness? Melville takes on the highest and grandest themes - social progress, racial relations, psychological trauma, faith, redemption, our place in the cosmos - and writes of them beautifully with precision, knowledge, drama, and humor. The characters are vivid, the plot is elemental but compelling, the story is rich in symbolism and foreshadowings, but these do not crowd our imagination - they expand our way of thinking, they are open-ended and provocative rather than restrictive and doctrinaire. Of course it has flaws - which in my view only add to its greatness, but making this novel strange and unconventional. Ahab's language (as the good afterward in my edition notes) is not credible in a realistic way, Ishmael stays on as narrator but disappears as a character altogether, the first section of the book is not in keeping with the story aboard the Pequod, some of the chapters are written in such a high rhetorical style as to be nearly impenetrable. But most are plain as day, vivid, striking, scary. You could read almost any chapter as a great essay in itself - and here we see Melville's strong debt to Sir Thos Browne, to Donne, or course to Shakespeare himself. Melville is no doubt the only American writer who can be taken seriously in the company of those - he was sadly both well after his time (his rhetoric was already antique by 1850) and well head of his time (his interest in formal experimentation, and in psychology, would have to wait till the 20th century before readers caught up with him). The amazing thing isn't (only) that we have Moby-Dick but that we almost lost it.