As I was suffering through the immensity of these readings, I realized that the bulk of the pages is not spent on developing the story line in any way, but in Melville's conveyance of his erudition on the subject of whales, the color of white, etc... I'm wondering what you guys think is the intrinsic value of these sections. Do we really need to learn encyclopedic knowledge on all species of whales in the course of reading this text? Wouldn't just learning about the sperm whale, and perhaps the right whale, be sufficient? I have a hunch that if these long tracts were edited out, people of all ages might not groan so much about reading Moby Dick. But the fact is that these sections have remained over the decades, so what makes the book incomplete without them?
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