Moby Dick would be truly great—in my humble opinion—if an editor could divide the book into Moby Dick and Addendum Encyclopedic Account of Whaling in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Though Ishmael takes careful pains to educate his readers on all there is to know about whaling et al, I’d say it’s quite unnecessary for a casual reader.
A quick internet search tells me I missed the boat, and the careful descriptions of every aspect of whaling are metaphors which cannot simply be separated from the novel without losing much of the meaning therein. Perhaps not for those careful readers, but for me, nothing would be lost, as I didn’t get the meaning in the first place.
Seeing as I missed most of the meaning of the book, I won’t comment on the themes and moral messages of the book—as these must be obvious—aside from saying I found the story of the hunt of the white whale entertaining and purposeful. The friendship between Queequeg and Ishmael was clever and humorous, the misadventures aboard the ship were well described. I will, instead, focus my comments on the writing portion, though I acknowledge my opinions are from a modern perspective and would probably never do to Melville.
The ruthless editor I have previously mentioned would also do well to delete about two-thirds of each soliloquy. Just enough to get the point across, and then let your characters stop talking, she might say. Then she might chastise Melville for switching from Ishmael’s narration to a third-person omniscient perspective without explanation towards the end of the novel. Then there were those several characters who pop into existence to be described in great detail and then simply fade into the background of the ship to never reappear (the cook and blacksmith come to mind). While they were all interesting, thoughtfully described, and generally the font of a moral lesson, my modern and stern editor would cast these characters out entirely, or else she would decrease their descriptions to something proportional to their contribution to the plot, not more than a few phrases.
My opinion is that Moby Dick is entertaining and worth reading, and if you don’t fancy yourself a great literary critic, the abridged version will do just as well as the unabridged version.