White Jacket by Herman Melville

I first came across White Jacket several years ago in a gigantic used bookstore in Florida. I hadn't heard of the story before, but the cover looked cool and I recognized Herman Melville's name, of course. I read Moby Dick in high school and really enjoyed it, so I figured I'd give this one a try. I put it on the American Authors section of my Classics Club list, and since it fit into the 19th Century Classic category of the Back to the Classics Challenge, I decided to pick it up this month.

Based on the cover, summary on the back, and my previous experience with Melville, I went into my reading assuming that this would be an adventure-at-sea type of novel. I ended up being entirely wrong. Accordingly, I must warn anyone reading this that a dreadfully uninspired and unrefined review is written below. I am going to do what I generally try to avoid when talking about classic novels; I'm going to whine about it being boring.

White Jacket is essentially a collection of short essays about what life was like for a seaman serving on a Man-of-War in the nineteenth century. Each chapter is narrated by a nameless protagonist, known only by the nickname White Jacket, who is a main-top man on the U.S.S. Neversink. Throughout the course of the novel, he discusses many different aspects of his life in the Navy. Everything, from the mildly interesting to the completely mundane, is described in great detail. Topics such as sleeping arrangements, meal prep, and leisure time are covered, along with several chapters detailing White Jacket's personal criticisms about the rules and regulations of the U.S. Navy during that time period.

These observations all take place during the Neversink's return voyage home, which is a fairly uneventful trip. As such, there are not many scenes of action in the story. Indeed, there is no real plot to the novel at all. It truly is just a series of musings about life on a frigate. Melville wrote White Jacket based on his personal experiences serving on the U.S.S. United States, and it definitely reads like he just took his journal entries and memories from that time and inserted a handful of fictional characters into them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but this goes on for over 500 pages, and that much information without a plot behind it starts to feel very, very long.

By the time I got to the last few hundred pages of this, I was desperate to finish. The writing wasn't bad at all, in fact, Melville's prose is eminently readable, but it just became way too much of the same thing. There were too many descriptions of banal topics and not enough characters or story to get engaged in. There were occasional flashes of interest spread throughout the text, but for every chapter with a dangerous storm or a gruesome leg amputation, there were twenty chapters about doing laundry, playing checkers, and visiting the barber. It was just not a fun read for me.

The novel is probably the most famous for its condemnation of corporal punishment in the Navy, most specifically the practice of flogging. This form of discipline was applied liberally on the ship, even just for minor offenses. It is clear that Melville abhorred flogging, and he includes several chapters about it, in which he argues that it is cruel, unconstitutional, and immoral. His arguments were so persuasive that this novel actually helped to get flogging banned in the Navy. He raises several other objections to the way the Navy is run throughout the text as well, and expounds at length about hypocrisy, the abuse of power, and the pointlessness of certain traditions. It seems that the overall point of White Jacket was not just to describe the life of an able seaman, but to offer suggestions on how to improve the Navy. These observations and critiques were interesting to a point, but like the other chapters in the novel, they became tiresome after a while. It is pretty cool that this book actually inspired real social changed though.

This wasn't a completely bad reading experience for me. There were some sections that stood out from the rest, the writing was solid and very descriptive, and any chapters concerning the protagonist's seemingly cursed white jacket were good for a laugh. There were even some bits of it that reminded me of themes from Moby Dick (which Melville would go on to write the following year). On the whole, however, I will not remember this novel as one of my favorites. It was just not the type of classic that I love. However, I always value the chance to experience the works of the past, so I'm not sorry I gave it a try.


Challenge Tally
Back to the Classics 2020 (19th Century Classic): 2/12
Classics Club (#81 on my list): 63/100 

Total Books Read in 2020: 6