The FBG Top 300 Books of All Time (fiction edition) | #2 The Stand by Stephen King | #1 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien ... it's a wrap (5 Viewers)

[rockaction]

That’s the problem sometimes with Melville—so many things are ironic and satirical you can lose what his authentic point of view is. He was a conflicted dude. Lemuel Shaw, the famous jurist that pioneered (being Massachusetts and all) a bunch of doctrines of law (workman’s comp among them), was Melville’s FIL and there were domestic issues to the point where Herman’s wife had letters where she purportedly asked people to abscond or kidnap her to get her away from Herman. It was bad. Herman was sympathetic to the working class while Shaw was patrician and well-heeled; so that was a tension, but there was also an inner tension because Herman desired status and success for his family and himself while fighting those very landed forces that included his own family.

So he had all of this inner tumult, intellectual unrest, and some heavy, self-imposed contradictory feelings regarding his status and successes and failures. Given this and his writing style, the reader is often not totally aware at all times what his point of view is on the issue he’s writing about and tackling when he sets about to critiquing big ideas and lofty things. One gets the feeling he either didn’t like himself or he loved himself like only a true narcissist could. He was underground like Dostoyevsky’s man. He ditched prose for poetry later in life and died, in his own mind, a failed poet.

eta* done editing