Herman Melville - White-Jacket (1850)

It's often said that, in Huckleberry Finn, "life is a river". White-Jacket, Herman Melville's fifth novel, may be his take on this: "the world is a ship". In fact, the subtitle of White-Jacket is The World in a Man-of-War. This is an interesting idea for an allegory and, in many ways, Melville succeeds. Using the events on the man-of-war Neversink, Melville draws many parallels to society in general and human justice in particular. Further, in the final chapter, Melville provides a moral to tie his allegory together.

However, despite these successes, White-Jacket pretty much fails as a novel. The main problem is that Melville exercises no control over his allegory. White-Jacket contains far too much content that doesn't add to the allegory, and some of it clearly is not even meant to. While every word and chapter does not necessarily have to drive an allegory (unless you're Dante and writing something genius like The Divine Comedy), the narrative that does not propel the allegory should have some point. Unfortunately, that is not the case here and it makes White-Jacket pretty tedious.

The excess material is especially frustrating because White-Jacket quite simply tells no story. There is no plot, no character development, no conflict, nothing other than the allegory. So if a chapter doesn't fit in with the allegory, it really serves no purpose whatsoever! Although I did find many of the vignettes interesting, it just wasn't enough. And, quite frankly, if Melville had honed his allegory the way he should have, his final chapter - which is terribly prosaic - would not have been required.

Oddly, it seems to me that in writing his fourth, fifth, and sixth novels, Melville repeats the path he took with Typee, Omoo, and Mardi (his first three). His fourth book (Redburn) was like Typee, even though Typee was more romantic and Redburn darker. Both are quite successful works, tell a great story, and have clear themes communicated by those stories. Omoo suffered from a directionless narrative that never came together as a story, very much like what we have with White-Jacket. In his third book, Melville made an ambitious attempt at something deeper and, since his sixth book is Moby-Dick, the parallel seems to hold.

I also found myself thinking of Redburn and White-Jacket as two halves of the whole that would become Moby-Dick. Redburn focuses on the story, and White-Jacket focuses on an all-encompassing theme. In Moby-Dick, Melville would attempt both in a single novel. In addition, Moby-Dick's theme of the microcosm echoes the 'world in a man-of-war' theme in White-Jacket.

Okay, all that aside, is this a book worth reading? The answer is 'no', unless you're interested in delving into Melville's development as a writer or have an urge to learn in great detail what it was like to serve on a man-of-war in the 1800s. Bottom-line, in White-Jacket, Melville was overtly trying to write another 'tale of the sea' to earn money and regain the attention of his readers, while creating a deeper work 'under the radar'. However, the lack of plot means the book fails dismally as the former and the lack of control by Melville undermines the latter. White-Jacket could have been much better, but Melville clearly needed more time, effort, and craft on this novel to realize this potential.