Hello, I wondered if anyone could help me with a query I've had for ages. In Green Shadows, White Whale, Ray Bradbury talks a bit about his choices when writing the screenplay to Moby Dick (Melville's my favourite author - The Piazza Tales are amazing). One of the first things he says on the subject is that Fedallah, the Parsee, is "the biggest problem with the book" or words to that effect, and that the book doesn't work with him in it. Obviously, he decided not to include him in the film. I was just wondering if anyone had any idea what Ray Bradbury's reasons were for this, and why he felt so strongly that Fedallah was ruining the story. Any ideas? This has bugged me for years and years, and I'd love to know what Ray Bradbury's thinking is...

Thanks.

From what I can gather, Ray had the daunting mission of wrestling Melville's masterwork into a two hour script. No easy task. Scenes had to be cut. Dialogue needed to be consolidated, and in the case of Fedallah, characters had to go. Ray felt that Fedallah had all the really good lines of dialogue and he wanted to give them to Ahab. When Ray was saying that Fedallah was "the biggest problem with the book," he wasn't insulting Meville as much as he was commenting on the biggest problem of adapting Melville. From what Ray has said, he simply chose to combine some of Fedallah into Ahab. Does this make sense? I hope so, because, like Ray in 1953, "I've never been able to read the damn thing!"

When preparing from my reading list for my MA English Comps, I read everything BUT Moby Dick. It seemed too long. This neglect of an American Literary Masterpiece nearly (but not quite) cost me my Comps.

I finally did read it, and really enjoyed it; but the truth is I skipped through the whaling history chapters pretty quickly.

Adaptation, like translation, is an art form that combines a sensitivities of the artist with the skills and disciplines of an academic.

Glad you asked. I read the whole damn thing, complete and unabridged, cover to cover, last summer, and enjoyed all of it, though I got more out of some parts than others.

From what Ray had said in "Green Shadows, White Whale," about how Fedallah bogged down the story, I had expected him to be this huge character in the book, coming in and making a pest of himself at every other thing. I was really surprised at how little, in the course of this long story, he actually turned up! He was an unnecessary character dramatically. I would guess the reason Melville included him would be for what has now been transformed into "cultural diversity." Back then it would have been considered cultural in the sense of things foreign lending an exotic (read "classy") touch. Sometimes an "ethnic" character could become token, as in your "token Indian" there to utter mystical sayings. Certainly it is very important that the book portrayed whaling as being an enterprise by men of different backgrounds. Not everyone was this white New Englander of Anglo-Saxon descent. The movie, as well as the book, portrayed this, but didn't need Fedallah to do so.

Wow, responses so soon. Many thanks. Honestly, Moby-Dick is a real classic (I even like the whaling chapters), and I'd urge anyone to read it. The only reason I'm so interested in this whole Fedallah business is because he has a crucial scene with Ahab, I think it's at night in the small hours, where he decodes Ahab's dream of the hearse, and the scene itself seems really Bradbury-esque. Also, I always felt Fedallah is sort of a symbolic lynchpin for the book - as a Parsee, he kind of represents conflict between light and dark, and his relationship with Ahab is really ambiguous and interesting. (May have spelled ambiguous incorrectly back there - serves me right for trying to be clever.) Anyway, thanks for such a wide range of answers. I've been bugged by this for a while, and who'd've thought just typing the question into the internet would help? Cheers!