Talk:White-Jacket

69.117.243.181 (talk) 04:33, 16 June 2015 (UTC)Why is there citation needed on the assertion of it being Melville's most politically strident work, yet nothing on it being instrumental in removing flogging from naval practice? Seems that one would prove the other.

White-Jacket not a novel
We long ago had a discussion of Melville's books before Moby-Dick, and agreed they were not novels, and in this case, Howard Vincent's The Tailoring of White-Jacket is pretty clear. Searching on the Internet Archive copy found these hits:
 * Page 33 "Not a novel, White-Jacket has neither a strong central hero around whom a continuous and developing action is built, nor consequently any similar sort of villain."
 * Page 60 "Structurally, White-Jacket is built as a documentary and not as a novel; the narrator serves more as guide than as creator..."
 * Page 108 "White-Jacket, then, is disjunctive, spasmodic, but this disturbs only when the reader demands or expects what Melville never intended to write — a novel."

I'm sure that there are later references to it as a novel, certainly as partly fiction, and including it in the Wikipedia Novel Project is useful, but Vincent is speaking directly to the question from Melville's point of view, so in a while I will take out or paraphrase the references to "novel".ch (talk) 20:27, 6 May 2023 (UTC)