Spoilers for V. & Moby-Dick

[Erik T. Burns]

just a head's up if you haven't read these two books I am going to quote
the last lines below so turn away now!

I just finished reading V. for the nth time but the first time in probably
20 years, and it was rollicking fun & obscure mystery all the way through
as expected. When I finally got to the end, the final lines gave me a real
Moby-Dick frisson and looking at the two of them together (see / sea below)
I understand why.

Given the peacock tails / spouter whales poem much earlier on in the book,
and the overall arch of Stencil's madly obsessive search for V. and
answers, and the fact that Stencil like Ahab goes down with his ship, maybe
there's more just the anxiety of influence at work.

anyhoo, just a thought. If anyone knows of any critical work that looks at
these two books together, do tell. (I know of some on Melville & TRP, but
they are about Gravity's Rainbow, mainly, like this one
<https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/24078356>).

Moby-Dick (last lines, pre-epilogue):

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud
of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

V (last lines):

Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that
circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for
fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling, and
creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down
again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena
- whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch
thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum – showed nothing at all of what
came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.