Captain Ahab and Tom Sawyer are kindred souls: an excerpt from Chapter 8 of Out West: A California Memoir (wipfandstock.com) coming out Winter 2021

How hard is it to determine whether Moby Dick or Huck Finn is the greatest American Novel? I know it’s a short list. Yes, Twain deals with the societal issue of the time that was tearing the country apart, slavery and in that respect it is as real as it can be. In contrast, the lyricism of his writing when Huck and Jim are on the raft together going down the Mississippi is beautiful and they are free to love one another and see each other’s heart. But I’m a champion of Literary Realism and Melville writes all of us onto the Pequod as passengers. Although the character development in the first one hundred pages is familiar and at times quite humorous, once you get on the ship you are Melville’s prisoner, just like the crew held captive by Ahab’s megalomaniac pursuit of the whale. The reader struggles through the minutia of each chapter, like the one on cooking whale blubber, or sharpening a harpoon, or 19^th Century navigational instruments, but has to keep reading until the whale shows up. Mercifully, the chapters are short, but we don’t get to see Moby Dick until we’re three hundred pages in. This monotonous boredom is the life of an eighteenth century whaler. It is a bummer of an ending because we only see the whale three times, when Moby Dick finally sinks the ship and the crew is killed except for Ishmael. And for you Huck Finn fans, which was first published in 1884, I venture to say that Twain was influenced by Melville’s Moby Dick, published in 1851, in his development of Tom Sawyer’s character. Just as Ahab uses his crew for his maniacal purpose, by tempting them with gold to overcome their fears, Tom uses Huck, abuses Jim, and nearly drives his aunt Sally and Uncle Silas insane when he forces Huck and Jim to go along with his fantastical, maniacal schemes to break Jim out of captivity. Tom only cared about satisfying his desire to playact his great adventure. Like Ahab, Tom is truly insane. Like the crew of the Pequod and Ahab, Huck and Jim are mesmerized by the force of Tom’s presence and imagination. He spends weeks concocting the nonsensical details of Jim’s escape, when Jim could’ve been freed the very first night. On the night of the escape, he nearly gets the three of them killed. But nobody dies, unlike the doomed crew of the Pequod and Tom doesn’t lose a leg, even though he receives a bullet wound to his calf.   English is a great major.