Write a detailed analysis and review of Moby Dick, and Cannery Row, from the respective viewpoint of the fish.
##
Cannery Row and Moby-Dick: A Comparative Analysis
Although Cannery Row (1945) and Moby-Dick (1851) are separated by nearly a century, genre, and temperament, they are both preoccupied with ecologies of labor, violence, and community—the difference lies in how each novel organizes itself around the animal life that permeates its world.
In Moby-Dick, the whale is not merely present but constitutive: Melville elevates an actual cetacean into a metaphysical antagonist, a symbol of inscrutability, and an adversarial gravitational center that shapes the fates, psychologies, and philosophies of the crew of the Pequod.
In contrast, Steinbeck’s sardine schools and tide-pool fauna are omnipresent but never individuated. They form a steady environmental hum, an ecological backdrop that frames the working-class rituals of Cannery Row’s human inhabitants without ever intruding as agents of narrative destiny. Where Melville endows the whale with a mythic singularity—“the grand hooded phantom”—Steinbeck’s fish remain plural, interchangeable, and subtly Darwinian, emphasizing systems rather than symbols.
Structurally, the novels create very different story arcs from their marine milieus.
Moby-Dick is teleological, continuously tightening as Ahab’s monomania accelerates the narrative toward catastrophe. The novel stretches outward in its encyclopedic asides, but its plot moves with the force of tragic inevitability: every digression is ultimately in service to the confrontation with the white whale.
Cannery Row, however, is deliberately episodic and anti-teleological. Its arc resembles tide patterns more than a plotted voyage; Steinbeck’s chapters function as linked sketches, gathered thematically rather than causally, producing a sociological cross-section rather than a quest. Instead of Ahab’s obsession, Cannery Row’s narrative energy is diffuse—emanating from Mack and the boys’ well-meaning failures, from Doc’s anthropological curiosity, and from Steinbeck’s gentle satire of human community.
If Melville’s novel is centrifugal—throwing off philosophical treatises and cetological catalogs as it spirals toward doom—Steinbeck’s is centripetal, continually returning to the Row as a micro-ecosystem whose stability depends on the balance of its inhabitants.
Despite these differences, both novels share certain structural affinities.
- Each author embeds scientific and quasi-scientific discourse—Melville’s cetology and Steinbeck’s biological interludes—into the narrative fabric.
- Both refuse to isolate human dramas from the natural world, depicting their settings as holistic systems in which biological, economic, and emotional forces converge.
- And both novels center outsider figures (Ishmael and Doc) whose observational detachment functions as a philosophical lens, transforming place into meaning.
Yet the stakes diverge dramatically: Moby-Dick is apocalyptic, framed by cosmic hostility; Cannery Row is restorative, framed by communal endurance. Melville’s world is a spiritual battleground; Steinbeck’s is a tide pool—complex, fragile, and quietly resilient.
A Closing Dialogue
Setting: A rocky tide pool off Monterey at sunset. A sardine—the sort that never gets a name in Steinbeck—hovers near the surface. Rising from the depths is none other than the White Whale himself, taking a vacation day from metaphysical torment.
Sardine (Cannery Row):
You’re awfully big for this neighborhood, friend. Planning to swallow the whole Row?
Moby Dick:
Please. I am retired from symbolic labor. For decades I was forced to represent Fate, Nature, God, and the Unknowable, sometimes all before breakfast.
Sardine:
Tough gig. In our book, we mostly form “shimmering schools” and provide atmosphere. No symbolism, no allegory. Just… fish.
Moby Dick:
Atmosphere sounds lovely. I was pursued across oceans by a monomaniac with a prosthetic leg and an attitude problem.
Sardine:
Our humans mostly argue over frogs, throw parties, and occasionally misplace a bar-girl. Worst thing that happens to us is we get canned. And even that is metaphorical half the time.
Moby Dick (sighing):
You’re lucky your author didn’t have theological ambitions. Melville kept insisting I stand for the cosmic void. I asked for a speaking line—just one. He said whales don’t talk.
Sardine:
Steinbeck didn’t give us lines either, but at least he let us keep our dignity. And our plurality. No pressure to be the Fish.
Moby Dick:
Imagine being known as “The White Whale” for eternity. You try going incognito with a nickname like that.
Sardine:
Look, if you ever want to blend in, you can join one of our schools. We move fast and no one can tell who’s who. Total anonymity.
Moby Dick:
Tempting. But if I disappear, an entire graduate seminar collapses.
Sardine:
Fair enough. Just don’t breach around Mack and the boys. They’d probably try to throw you a party that goes horribly wrong.
Moby Dick:
If it goes any better than the one Ahab threw, I’m in.
The tide shifts. The whale dives; the sardine darts. Both vanish into their respective novels, relieved to have shared a moment of author-free existence
