A list of the themes in Moby Dick

I guess there is a lot more to say about Moby Dick than this, but here is a start: -

These mainly are summarised from the introduction to the OUP version.
1.    It is a prose epic on Whaling.
2.    It depicts human labour and ingenuity at work in mastering the navigation and sailing of the sea.
3.    It includes many different nationalities among the crew of the Pequod, and draws tales and examples from many different lands and customs, so it endeavours to be about mankind (excluding women) rather than one nation.
4.    It combines the description of procedures of a complex industry with the archaic/ epic theme of the hunt.
5.    It shows how solitary men combine together to manage a corporate, communal existence.
6.    It explores how chance, free will and necessity all interweavingly work together (the weaving loom is a recurrent metaphor).
7.    It asks about the relationship between man’s system of signs (from different cultures, and including books and writing), and nature’s wonders. Queequeg’s body is covered in tattooings, many of which he cannot read himself, but which are prophetic writings showing a complete theory of the heavens and the earth in ‘hieroglyphic marks’. References to other books and authors abound. We have a huge need to record in texts, what is the relationship between our texts and the world?
8.    It looks at how the erotic instincts run counter to the death instincts (thanatos). Queequeg's erotic instincts fuel his loyalty and friendship – no such instincts seem to fire Ahab.
9.    The mechanical and metal mindset of Ahab – a ruthless and homogenising force – is, for grandiose ends, turned against the force of nature, embodied by Moby Dick. (To what extent is ruthless Ahab a metaphor for America’s industry?)
10. To Ahab, the whale is evil, and his thought patterns are based on the idea of ‘embattled exclusivity’. This thought pattern is all-annihilating and counter to Ishmael’s tolerant inclusiveness : ‘his eroticized and playful porousness to the wholeness of life.’
11. In his eclectic style, Melville found a new way to represent America, founded on the Bible itself and borrowing its style, and pilfering from other modern texts, and ancient myths, but including the speech of sailors old and young, and black and white, mixing demotic humour and grandiose phrasing.

Tah-dah! It was a very long and hard read – I felt overwhelmed -  but in places a great joy, and I do believe that Melville truly meant to write about all the above complexities which had troubled his mind, so it was a very ambitious book which deserved a lot of concentration.