Moby-Dick as history
I would venture to estimate that literally 60% to 70% of this book is purely educational (and mostly nonfiction), in which Ishmael describes whales and the process of whaling...in great detail. He can go on for chapters about it, actually taking a break from the story. Needless to say, unless you are interested in learning about whales and whaling, you'll probably find this book to be quite boring. At times, I found much of it to be quite tedious; but in the end, I rather liked the educational stuff and even enjoyed reading some of it. Sometimes I could almost sympathise with the narrator--writing about a topic that few people care about, and yet writing with such persuasiveness and enthusiasm that he makes you care about whales, too (at one point, I seriously wanted to become a whale conservationist). The information about whales and whaling became genuinely fascinating--the size of the whales, their habits, the process of hunting whales, how the whalers get the oil from the whales, etc... Melville's writing perspective also varied a good deal. Sometimes he portrayed the whales as vicious, and the whalers as victims; but probably more often, he took the whale's side, and portrayed the whalers as cruel, murderous hunters. Though I think he unnecessarily went to both extremes, having these two perspectives was pretty fair of him.
As for all the various whaling accidents and things that happen throughout the book, we are told that some of these things did actually happen in real life (Moby-Dick was actually based on the real-life "Wreck of the Whaleship Essex", a book I recommend). It gave me a much better understanding of whaling, and I felt more interested in the book, since it's so largely based on fact and not fantasy.
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