Syntax of Moby Dick and the Internet

This is my first time reading Moby Dick and my initial thoughts are all about the language of the story.

Reading the novel makes me feel like I'm listening to a drunk but educated stranger turned sailor. It's full of tangents and interruptions, rambling analysis and dramatic self reflections. Intriguing as it is, sometimes I get a little lost in the commas and semicolons. The first page sets the reader up for a long, syntactical journey: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Readers have to take time to listen to the pauses. They have to connect the bits of sentences to one another. The fact that the novel is first person narrative also puts into perspective how the story is filtered - through an unreliable narrator that from his first sentence ("Call me Ishmael") implies that there is a story to him readers won't ever fully know or understand.

Relating it to the digital culture of today, I think we have a lot of blogs and personal posts on the internet that follow suit with Moby Dick's syntax. Many posts go unfiltered. They are in first person. People don't take time using spell check or grammar check before uploading a tweet or facebook status. Posts can ramble on (like mine right now actually). Comments underneath Youtube videos or new articles turn into tangents and spitfire arguments (like the tangents in the book). There are exceptions of course. This class is an example of that; posts are aimed towards a professor/university student level to give in depth analysis of Moby Dick (or literature in general) and our observations and understanding of digital culture and digital humanities so we tend to watch our posts for vocabulary and grammar. It's just interesting to see how the commonplace and upfront speech in this novel reflect the colloquial language of half the internet.

Also, I happened to find this blog post about tangent tendencies in classic literature and thought it was nice to get other examples of this - and to see I'm not the only one blogging about this!