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Take a couple of minutes to watch this debate between E.L. Doctorow and Margaret Atwood about Moby Dick. As you may be aware, Moby Dick is, at a surface level, a story about a mad sea captain trying to hunt down a whale. Atwood says the whale is a symbol of global capitalism, while Doctorow says it is a symbol of the blind unmanageable destructiveness of nature.
Then, have a scan through the comments. The most popular comment asks, “could these people be any more fucking boring holy shit” and the second most popular comment refers to the debate as “pseudo-intellectual BS by pseudo-intelligent assholes.” The general thrust of the comments seems to be “this is a story about a mad sea captain hunting down a whale, and how dare you insist that it has to mean something?”
So, what do you say? Are Doctorow and Atwood ruining a perfectly good adventure story? Is it fair to accuse critics like this of over-analysis? Why does two minutes of symbolic analysis seem to have made these commentors so upset?
And what do you think the whale really symbolizes?