Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville.

The book is
sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for
revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at
the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre
classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist. Moby-Dick was published to mixed
reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891.
Its reputation as a "Great American Novel" was established only in the 20th century, after the
centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written the book
himself,[1] and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the
world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".[2] Its opening sentence, "Call me
Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.[3]

Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850, and would eventually take 18 months to
write the book, a full year more than he had first anticipated. Writing was interrupted by his
making the acquaintance of Nathaniel Hawthorne in August 1850, and by the creation of the
"Mosses from an Old Manse" essay as a first result of that friendship. The book is dedicated to
Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius".

The basis for the work is Melville's 1841 whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet. The novel also
draws on whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The
white whale is modeled on the notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick, and the
book's ending is based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. The detailed and realistic
descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a
culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and
the existence of God. In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices
ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and
asides.

In October 1851, the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" was published in Harper's New Monthly
Magazine. The same month, the whole book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale
in London, and under its definitive title in a single-volume edition in New York in November.
There are hundreds of differences between the two editions, most slight but some important and
illuminating. The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages;
Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change to the title for the New York
edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as "Moby Dick", without the
hyphen.[4] One factor that led British reviewers to scorn the book was that it seemed to be told by
a narrator who perished with the ship: the British edition lacked the Epilogue, which recounts
Ishmael's survival. About 3,200 copies were sold during the author's life.

Contents
 1 Plot
 2 Structure
o 2.1 Point of view
 o 2.2 Chapter structure
o 2.3 Nine meetings with other ships
 3 Themes
 4 Style
o 4.1 Assimilation of Shakespeare
 5 Background
o 5.1 Autobiographical elements
o 5.2 Whaling sources
o 5.3 Composition
 6 Publication history
o 6.1 Melville's revisions and British editorial revisions
o 6.2 British censorship and missing "Epilogue"
o 6.3 Last-minute change of title
o 6.4 Sales and earnings
 7 Reception
o 7.1 British
o 7.2 American
 8 Legacy and adaptations
 9 Editions
 10 Footnotes
 11 References
 12 External links

Plot
See also: List of Moby-Dick characters

Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts with plans
to sign up for a whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a
bed with the tattooed cannibal Polynesian Queequeg, a harpooneer whose father was king of the
fictional island of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapple's
sermon on Jonah, then head for Nantucket. Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad
and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod. Peleg describes Captain Ahab: "He's a grand,
ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless "has his humanities". They hire Queequeg the
following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg
join Ahab. While provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas
Day, the Pequod leaves the harbor.

Ishmael discusses cetology (the zoological classification and natural history of the whale), and
describes the crew members. The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker with a
realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-
go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay
Head, and the third mate is Flask, also from Martha's Vineyard, short, stout, whose harpooneer is
Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident of Nantucket.
When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck, he announces he is out for revenge on the white
whale which took one leg from the knee down and left him with a prosthesis fashioned from a
whale's jawbone. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin,
which he nails to the mast. Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit.
Ahab's purpose exercises a mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine".
Instead of rounding Cape Horn, Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa.
One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat — "its warp seemed necessity, his
hand free will, and Queequeg's sword chance" — Tashtego sights a sperm whale. Five
previously unknown men appear on deck and are revealed to be a special crew selected by Ahab
and explain the shadowy figures seen boarding the ship. Their leader, Fedallah, a Parsee, is
Ahab's harpooneer. The pursuit is unsuccessful.

Moby Dick attacking a whaling boat.

Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod makes the first of nine sea-encounters, or
"gams", with other ships: Ahab hails the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the
White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into the sea before he
can answer. Ishmael explains that because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sails on
without the customary "gam", which defines as a "social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships",
in which the two captains remain on one ship and the chief mates on the other. In the second gam
off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho, a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a
"judgment of God" is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive
officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and
was killed by the whale.

Ishmael digresses on pictures of whales, brit (microscopic sea creatures on which whales feed),
squid and — after four boats lowered in vain because Daggoo mistook a giant squid for the white
whale — whale-lines. The next day, in the Indian Ocean, Stubb kills a sperm whale, and that
night Fleece, the Pequod's black cook, prepares him a rare whale steak. Fleece, at Stubb's
request, delivers a sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale's carcass, tied
to the ship, saying that their nature is to be voracious, but they must overcome it. The whale is
prepared, beheaded, and barrels of oil are tried out. Standing at the head of the whale, Ahab begs
it to speak of the depths of the sea. The Pequod next encounters the Jeroboam, which not only
lost its chief mate to Moby Dick, but also is now plagued by an epidemic.

The whale carcass still lies in the water. Queequeg mounts it, tied to Ishmael's belt by a monkey-
rope as if they were Siamese twins. Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to
a yardarm opposite the sperm whale's head. Ishmael compares the two heads in a philosophical
way: the right whale is Lockean, stoic, and the sperm whale as Kantean, platonic. Tashtego cuts
into the head of the sperm whale and retrieves buckets of oil. He falls into the head, and the head
falls off the yardarm into the sea. Queequeg dives after him and frees his mate with his sword.

The Pequod next gams with the Jungfrau from Bremen. Both ships sight whales simultaneously,
with the Pequod winning the contest. The three harpooneers dart their harpoons, and Flask
delivers the mortal strike with a lance. The carcass sinks, and Queequeg barely manages to
escape. The Pequod's next gam is with the French whaler Bouton de Rose, whose crew is
ignorant of the ambergris in the gut of the diseased whale in their possession. Stubb talks them
out of it, but Ahab orders him away. Days later, an encounter with a harpooned whale prompts
Pip, a little black cabin-boy from Connecticut, to jump out of his whale boat. The whale must be
cut loose, because the line has Pip so entangled in it. Furious, Stubb orders Pip to stay in the
whale boat, but Pip later jumps again, and is left alone in the immense sea and has gone insane
by the time he is picked up.

Cooled sperm oil congeals and must be squeezed back into liquid state; blubber is boiled in the
try-pots on deck; the warm oil is decanted into casks, and then stowed in the ship. After the
operation, the decks are scrubbed. The coin hammered to the main mast shows three Andes
summits, one with a flame, one with a tower, and one a crowing cock. Ahab stops to look at the
doubloon and interprets the coin as signs of his firmness, volcanic energy, and victory; Starbuck
takes the high peaks as evidence of the Trinity; Stubb focuses on the zodiacal arch over the
mountains; and Flask sees nothing of any symbolic value at all. The Manxman mutters in front
of the mast, and Pip declines the verb "look".

Queequeg
The Pequod next gams with the Samuel Enderby of London, captained by Boomer, a down-to-
earth fellow who lost his right arm to Moby Dick. Nevertheless, he carries no ill will toward the
whale, which he regards not as malicious, but as awkward. Ahab puts an end to the gam by
rushing back to his ship. The narrator now discusses the subjects of (1) whalers supply; (2) a glen
in Tranque in the Arsacides islands full of carved whale bones, fossil whales, whale skeleton
measurements; (3) the chance that the magnitude of the whale will diminish and that the
leviathan might perish.

Leaving the Samuel Enderby, Ahab wrenches his ivory leg and orders the carpenter to fashion
him another. Starbuck informs Ahab of oil leakage in the hold. Reluctantly, Ahab orders the
harpooneers to inspect the casks. Queequeg, sweating all day below decks, develops a chill and
soon is almost mortally feverish. The carpenter makes a coffin for Queequeg, who fears an
ordinary burial at sea. Queequeg tries it for size, with Pip sobbing and beating his tambourine,
standing by and calling himself a coward while he praises Queequeg for his gameness. Yet
Queequeg suddenly rallies, briefly convalesces, and leaps up, back in good health. Henceforth,
he uses his coffin for a spare seachest, which is later caulked and pitched to replace the Pequod's
life buoy.

The Pequod sails northeast toward Formosa and into the Pacific Ocean. Ahab, with one nostril,
smells the musk from the Bashee isles, and with the other, the salt of the waters where Moby
Dick swims. Ahab goes to Perth, the blacksmith, with a bag of racehorse shoenail stubs to be
forged into the shank of a special harpoon, and with his razors for Perth to melt and fashion into
a harpoon barb. Ahab tempers the barb in blood from Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo.

The Pequod gams next with the Bachelor, a Nantucket ship heading home full of sperm oil.
Every now and then, the Pequod lowers for whales with success. On one of those nights in the
whaleboat, Fedallah prophesies that neither hearse nor coffin can be Ahab's, that before he dies,
Ahab must see two hearses — one not made by mortal hands and the other made of American
wood — that Fedallah will precede his captain in death, and finally that only hemp can kill
Ahab.

As the Pequod approaches the Equator, Ahab scolds his quadrant for telling him only where he is
and not where he will be. He dashes it to the deck. That evening, an impressive typhoon attacks
the ship. Lightning strikes the mast, setting the doubloon and Ahab's harpoon aglow. Ahab
delivers a speech on the spirit of fire, seeing the lightning as a portent of Moby Dick. Starbuck
sees the lightning as a warning, and feels tempted to shoot the sleeping Ahab with a musket.
Next morning, when he finds that the lightning disoriented the compass, Ahab makes a new one
out of a lance, a maul, and a sailmaker's needle. He orders the log be heaved, but the weathered
line snaps, leaving the ship with no way to fix its location.
Moby Dick

The Pequod is now heading southeast toward Moby Dick. A man falls overboard from the mast.
The life buoy is thrown, but both sink. Now Queequeg proposes that his superfluous coffin be
used as a new life buoy. Starbuck orders the carpenter take care it is lidded and caulked. Next
morning, the ship meets in another truncated gam with the Rachel, commanded by Captain
Gardiner from Nantucket. The Rachel is seeking survivors from one of her whaleboats which
had gone after Moby Dick. Among the missing is Gardiner's young son. Ahab refuses to join the
search.

Twenty-four hours a day, Ahab now stands and walks the deck, while Fedallah shadows him.
Suddenly, a sea hawk grabs Ahab's slouched hat and flies off with it. Next, the Pequod, in a
ninth and final gam, meets the Delight, badly damaged and with five of her crew left dead by
Moby Dick. Her captain shouts that the harpoon which can kill the white whale has yet to be
forged, but Ahab flourishes his special lance and once more orders the ship forward. Ahab shares
a moment of contemplation with Starbuck. Ahab speaks about his wife and child, calls himself a
fool for spending 40 years on whaling, and claims he can see his own child in Starbuck's eye.
Starbuck tries to persuade Ahab to return to Nantucket to meet both their families, but Ahab
simply crosses the deck and stands near Fedallah.

On the first day of the chase, Ahab smells the whale, climbs the mast, and sights Moby Dick. He
claims the doubloon for himself, and orders all boats to lower except for Starbuck's. The whale
bites Ahab's boat in two, tosses the captain out of it, and scatters the crew. On the second day of
the chase, Ahab leaves Starbuck in charge of the Pequod. Moby Dick smashes the three boats
that seek him into splinters and tangles their lines. Ahab is rescued, but his ivory leg and
Fedallah are lost. Starbuck begs Ahab to desist, but Ahab vows to slay the white whale, even if
he would have to dive through the globe itself to get his revenge.

On the third day of the chase, Ahab sights Moby Dick at noon, and sharks appear, as well. Ahab
lowers his boat for a final time, leaving Starbuck again on board. Moby Dick breaches and
destroys two boats. Fedallah's corpse, still entangled in the fouled lines, is lashed to the whale's
back, so Moby Dick turns out to be the hearse Fedallah prophesied.
"Possessed by all the fallen angels", Ahab plants his harpoon in the whale's flank. Moby Dick
smites the whaleboat, tossing its men into the sea. Only Ishmael is unable to return to the boat.
He is left behind in the sea, and so is the only crewman of the Pequod to survive the final
encounter. The whale now fatally attacks the Pequod. Ahab then realizes that the destroyed ship
is the hearse made of American wood in Fedallah's prophesy.

The whale returns to Ahab, who stabs at him again. As he does so, the line gets tangled, and
Ahab bends over to free it. In doing so the line loops around Ahab's neck, and as the stricken
whale swims away, the captain is drawn with him out of sight. Queequeg's coffin comes to the
surface, the only thing to escape the vortex when Pequod sank. For an entire day, Ishmael floats
on it, until the Rachel, still looking for its lost seamen, rescues him.

Structure
Point of view

Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with use of many different genres including sermons,
stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings.[5] Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing
of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way,
explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught."[6] Scholar John Bryant calls him
the novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice."[7] Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as
narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls "forecastle Ishmael", and who is the younger
Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown older."[5] A
second distinction avoids confusion of either of both Ishmaels with the author Herman Melville.
Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael."[8]

Chapter structure

According to critic Walter Bezanson, the chapter structure can be divided into "chapter
sequences", "chapter clusters", and "balancing chapters". The simplest sequences are of narrative
progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters on whale painting, and
sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The
Quarter-Deck" or the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". Chapter clusters are the
chapters on the significance of the colour white, and those on the meaning of fire. Balancing
chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue," or similars, such
as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles".[9]

Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters as structured
around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered
Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged, foreshadowing the Pequod's own
fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the
whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the
massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". A typhoon
near Japan sets the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick.[3]
The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two
subpatterns. These chapters start with the ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical
classification of whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of whales in general
and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically ordered commentary on pictures of whales.
The climax to this section is chapter 57, "Of whales in paint etc.", which begins with the humble
(a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the constellation Cetus). The next chapter
("Brit"), thus the other half of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live whales,
and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied, more or less from front to rear and from
outer to inner parts, all the way down to the skeleton. Two concluding chapters set forth the
whale's evolution as a species and claim its eternal nature.[3]

Some "ten or more" of the chapters on whale killings, beginning at two-fifths of the book, are
developed enough to be called "events". As Bezanson writes, "in each case a killing provokes
either a chapter sequence or a chapter cluster of cetological lore growing out of the circumstance
of the particular killing," thus these killings are "structural occasions for ordering the whaling
essays and sermons".[10]

Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar
observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab
and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and
narrator.[11] As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education".[12]

Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and
Ishmael, with Ahab as a force of linearity and Ishmael a force of digression.[13] While both have
an angry sense of being orphaned, they try to come to terms with this hole in their beings in
different ways: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot in Moby-Dick
may be driven by Ahab's anger, Ishmael's desire to get a hold of the "ungraspable" accounts for
the novel's lyricism.[14] Buell sees a double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick,
Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt".[11]

One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions
sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry.[15] He calls
Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre "a Nabokovian touch".[16]

Nine meetings with other ships

A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings (gams) between the Pequod and
other ships. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative.
The initial two meetings and the last two are both close to each other. The central group of five
gams are separated by about 12 chapters, more or less. This pattern provides a structural element,
remarks Bezanson, as if the encounters were "bones to the book's flesh". Second, Ahab's
developing responses to the meetings plot the "rising curve of his passion" and of his
monomania. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship
individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads."[10]
Bezanson sees no single way to account for the meaning of all of these ships. Instead, they may
be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues, a masque of
the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and
so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale".[17]

Scholar Nathalia Wright sees the meetings and the significance of the vessels along other lines.
She singles out the four vessels which have already encountered Moby Dick. The first, the
Jeroboam, is named after the predecessor of the biblical King Ahab. Her "prophetic" fate is "a
message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel
Enderby, the Rachel, the Delight, and at last the Pequod". None of the other ships has been
completely destroyed because none of their captains shared Ahab's monomania; the fate of the
Jeroboam reinforces the structural parallel between Ahab and his biblical namesake: "Ahab did
more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him"
(I Kings 16:33).[18]

Themes
An early enthusiast for the Melville Revival, British author E. M. Forster, remarked in 1927:
"Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem."[19] Yet he saw as "the
essential" in the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent" beneath the
surface action and morality.[20]

Biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant sees epistemology as the book's theme. Ishmael's taxonomy
of whales merely demonstrates "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of
achieving certainty". She also contrasts Ishmael and Ahab's attitudes toward life, with Ishmael's
open-minded and meditative, "polypositional stance" as antithetical to Ahab's monomania,
adhering to dogmatic rigidity.[21]

Melville biographer Delbanco cites race as an example of this search for truth beneath surface
differences. All races are represented among the crew members of the Pequod. Although Ishmael
initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed cannibal, he soon decides, "Better sleep with a sober
cannibal than a drunken Christian."[22] While it may be rare for a mid-19th century American
book to feature black characters in a nonslavery context, slavery is frequently mentioned. The
theme of race is primarily carried by Pip, the diminutive black cabin boy.[23] When Pip has
almost drowned, Ahab, genuinely touched by Pip's suffering, questions him gently, Pip "can only
parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward for
Pip!'".[24]

Editors Bryant and Springer suggest perception is a central theme, the difficulty of seeing and
understanding, which makes deep reality hard to discover and truth hard to pin down. Ahab
explains that, like all things, the evil whale wears a disguise: "All visible objects, man, are but
pasteboard masks" — and Ahab is determined to "strike through the mask! How can the prisoner
reach outside, except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall" (Ch. 36,
"The Quarter-Deck"). This theme pervades the novel, perhaps never so emphatically as in "The
Doubloon" (Ch. 99), where each crewmember perceives the coin in a way shaped by his own
personality. Later, the American edition has Ahab "discover no sign" (Ch. 133) of the whale
when he is staring into the deep. In fact, Moby Dick is then swimming up at him. In the British
edition, Melville changed the word "discover" to "perceive", and with good reason, for
"discovery" means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better still, perception, is "a
matter of shaping what exists by the way in which we see it".[25] The point is not that Ahab
would discover the whale as an object, but that he would perceive it as a symbol of his
making.[25]

Yet Melville does not offer easy solutions. Ishmael and Queequeg's sensual friendship initiates a
kind of racial harmony that is shattered when the crew's dancing erupts into racial conflict in
"Midnight, Forecastle" (Ch. 40).[13] Fifty chapters later, Pip suffers mental disintegration after he
is reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and
brutalized, "Pip becomes the ship's conscience".[26] His views of property are another example of
wrestling with moral choice. In Chapter 89, Ishmael expounds the concept of the fast-fish and
the loose-fish, which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish
or ship, and observes that the British Empire took possession of American Indian lands in
colonial times in just the way that whalers take possession of an unclaimed whale.[27]

The novel has also been read as being critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical
movement Transcendentalism, attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist[28] Ralph
Waldo Emerson in particular.[29] The life and death of Ahab has been read as an attack on
Emerson's philosophy of self reliance, for one, in its destructive potential and potential
justification for egoism. Richard Chase writes that for Melville, 'Death–spiritual, emotional,
physical–is the price of self-reliance when it is pushed to the point of solipsism, where the world
has no existence apart from the all-sufficient self.'[30] In that regard, Chase sees Melville's art as
antithetical to that of Emerson's thought, in that Melville '[points] up the dangers of an
exaggerated self-regard, rather than, as ... Emerson loved to do, [suggested] the vital possibilities
of the self.'[30] Newton Arvin further suggests that self-reliance was, for Melville, really the
'[masquerade in kingly weeds of] a wild egoism, anarchic, irresponsible, and destructive.'[31]

Style
An incomplete inventory of the language of Moby-Dick by editors Bryant and Springer includes
"nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological" influences, and his style is
"alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic, and unceasingly allusive": Melville tests and exhausts
the possibilities of grammar, quotes from a range of well-known or obscure sources, and swings
from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or
wild prophetic archaism.[32]

Many words that make up the vocabulary of Moby-Dick are Melville's own coinages, critic
Newton Arvin recognizes, as if the English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things
Melville had to express. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly
plural, such as allurings, coincidings, and leewardings. Equally abundant are unfamiliar
adjectives and adverbs, including participial adjectives such as officered, omnitooled, and
uncatastrophied; participial adverbs such as intermixingly, postponedly, and
uninterpenetratingly; rarities such as the adjectives unsmoothable, spermy, and leviathanic, and
adverbs such as sultanically, Spanishly, and Venetianly; and adjectival compounds ranging from
odd to magnificent, such as "the message-carrying air", "the circus-running sun", and "teeth-
tiered sharks".[33] It is rarer for Melville to create his own verbs from nouns, but he does this with
what Arvin calls "irresistible effect", such as in "who didst thunder him higher than a throne",
and "my fingers ... began ... to serpentine and spiralize".[34] For Arvin, the essence of the writing
style of Moby-Dick lies in

the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's style--so
that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half
unreal one--this is the prime characteristic of his language. No feature of it could express
more tellingly the awareness that lies below and behind Moby-Dick--the awareness that
action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one
underlying reality.[35]

Arvin's categories have been slightly expanded by later critics, most notably Warner Berthoff.
The superabundant vocabulary of the work can be broken down into strategies used individually
and in combination. First, the original modification of words as "Leviathanism"[36] and the
exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and
"piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin").[37] Second, the use of existing words in new
ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks".[36] Third, words lifted from specialized fields, as
"fossiliferous".[36] Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating
brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires").[38] Fifth, using the
participial modifier to emphasize and to reinforce the already established expectations of the
reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow
preluding was all the scene ..."; "In this foreshadowing interval ...").[37]

Characteristic stylistic elements of another kind are the echoes and overtones.[39] Responsible for
this are both Melville's imitation of certain distinct styles and his habitual use of sources to shape
his own work. His three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and
Milton.[40]

Another notable stylistic element are the several levels of rhetoric, the simplest of which is "a
relatively straightforward expository style" that is evident of many passages in the cetological
chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and serve chiefly as transitions" between more
sophisticated levels. One of these is the "poetic" level of rhetoric, which Bezanson sees "well
exemplified" in Ahab's quarter-deck soliloquy, to the point that it can be set as blank verse.[41]
Set over a metrical patern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose,"
Bezanson suggests.[42] A third level of rhetoric is the idiomatic, and just as the poetic it hardly is
present in pure form. Examples of this are "the consistently excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as in
the way he encourages the rowing crew in a rhythm of speech that suggests "the beat of the oars
takes the place of the metronomic meter". The fourth and final level of rhetoric is the composite,
"a magnificent blending" of the first three and possible other elements:

The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to
it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his
buisiness, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in
China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs
them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes
to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at
nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while
under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
("Nantucket," Ch. 14).

This passage, from a chapter that Bezanson calls a comical "prose poem", blends "high and low
with a relaxed assurance". Similar great passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual
democracy" that can be found in the middle of "Knights and Squires".[43]

The elaborate use of the Homeric simile may not have been learned from Homer himself, yet
Matthiessen finds the writing "more consistently alive" on the Homeric than on the
Shakespearean level, especially during the final chase the "controlled accumulation" of such
similes emphasizes Ahab's hubris through a succession of land-images, for instance: "The ship
tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare
and turns up the level field" ("The Chase – Second Day," Ch. 134).[44] One paragraph-long simile
describes how the 30 men of the crew became a single unit:

For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak,
and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one
concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even
so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one
lord and keel did point to.
("The Chase – Second Day," Ch. 134).

The final phrase fuses the two halves of the comparison, the men become identical with the ship,
which follows Ahab's direction. The concentration only gives way to more imagery, with the
"mastheads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs". All these
images contribute their "startling energy" to the advance of the narrative. When the boats are
lowered, the imagery serves to dwarf everything but Ahab's will in the presence of Moby
Dick.[44] These similes, with their astonishing "imaginative abundance," are not only invaluable
in creating the dramatic movement, Matthiessen observes: "They are no less notable for breadth;
and the more sustained among them, for an heroic dignity."[45]

Assimilation of Shakespeare

The influence of Shakespeare on the book has been analyzed by F.O. Matthiessen in his 1941
study of the American Renaissance with such results that almost a half century later Bezanson
still considered him "the richest critic on these matters."[46] According to Matthiesen, then,
Melville's "possession by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences"[47] in that it made
Melville discover his own full strength "through the challenge of the most abundant imagination
in history".[47] Especially the influence of King Lear and Macbeth has attracted scholarly
attention.[48]
On almost every page debts to Shakespeare can be discovered, whether hard or easy to
recognize. Matthiessen points out that the "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying
nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echo the famous phrase in Macbeth: "Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."[47] As Matthiessen demonstrates, Ahab's first
extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36), is "virtually blank verse, and can be
printed as such":[47]

But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,

That thing unsays itself. There are men

From whom warm words are small indignity.
I mean not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn--
Living, breathing pictures painted by the sun.
The pagan leopards—the unrecking and
Unworshipping things, that live; and seek and give

No reason for the torrid life they feel![49]

Most importantly, through Shakespeare, Melville infused Moby-Dick with a power of expression
he had not previously possessed.[50] Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, had been "a
catalytic agent" for Melville, one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the
expression of profound natural forces".[51] The extent to which Melville was in full possession of
his powers is demonstrated by Matthiessen through the description of Ahab, which ends in
language "that suggests Shakespeare's but is not an imitation of it: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be
grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in
the unbodied air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly Shakespearean,
"but its two key words appear only once each in the plays ... and to neither of these usages is
Melville indebted for his fresh combination."[52] Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare,
Matthiessen concludes, gave Moby-Dick "a kind of diction that depended upon no source",[53]
and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman,
bigger than life".[54] The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on "a sense of speech
rhythm".[55]

In addition to this sense of rhythm, Melville acquired verbal resources which for Matthiessen
showed that he "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself
dramatic".[55] He had learned three essential things, Matthiessen sums up:

 To rely on verbs of action, "which lend their dynamic pressure to both movement and
meaning."[55] The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of
full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains indifferent" in "The
Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast",
which suggests "how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words;"[56]

 The Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds was not lost on him ("full-freighted");
  And, finally, Melville learned how to handle "the quickened sense of life that comes from
making one part of speech act as another – for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or
the coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun."[57]

The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by
Coleridge in his lecture on Hamlet: "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to
conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself. ...
thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances".[58] Coleridge's vocabulary is echoed in
some phrases that describe Ahab. Ahab seemed to have "what seems a half-wilful over-ruling
morbidness at the bottom of his nature", and "all men tragically great", Melville added, "are
made so through a certain morbidness; "all mortal greatness is but disease". In addition to this, in
Howard's view, the self-references of Ishmael as a "tragic dramatist", and his defense of his
choice of a hero who lacked "all outward majestical trappings" is evidence that Melville
"consciously thought of his protagonist as a tragic hero of the sort found in Hamlet and King
Lear".[59]

Background
Autobiographical elements

Moby-Dick is based on Melville's experience on the whaler Acushnet, however even the book's
most factual accounts of whaling are not straight autobiography. On December 30, 1840, he
signed on as a green hand for the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, planned to last for 52 months.
Its owner, Melvin O. Bradford, resembled Bildad, who signed on Ishmael, in that he was a
Quaker: on several instances when he signed documents, he erased the word "swear" and
replaced it with "affirm". But the shareholders of the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas
the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and orphaned children.[60] Its captain was
Valentine Pease, Jr., who was 43 years old at the start of the voyage.[61]

Although 26 men signed up as crew members, two did not show up for the ship's departure and
were replaced by one new crew member. The crew was not as heterogenous or exotic as the crew
of the Pequod. Five of the crew were foreigners, four of them Portuguese, and the others were
American, either at birth or naturalized. Three black men were in the crew, two seamen and the
cook. Fleece, the cook of the Pequod, was also black, so probably modeled on this Philadelphia-
born William Maiden, who was 38 years old when he signed for the Acushnet.[62]

Only 11 of the 26 original crew members completed the voyage. The others either deserted or
were regularly discharged.[63] The First Officer, Frederic Raymond, left the ship after a "fight"
with the captain.[64] A first mate, actually called Edward C. Starbuck, was on an earlier voyage
with Captain Pease, in the early 1830s, and was discharged at Tahiti under mysterious
circumstances.[65] The second mate on the Acushnet was John Hall, English-born but a
naturalized American.[66] He is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew
member Henry Hubbard, who, like Melville, had joined the voyage as a green hand. Hubbard
also identified the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the
voyage.[67] Hubbard's annotation appears in the chapter "The Castaway" and reveals that Pip's
falling into the water was authentic; Hubbard was with him in the same boat when the incident
occurred.[68]

Ahab seems to have had no model in real life, though his death may have been based on an
actual event. On May 18, 1843, Melville was aboard The Star, which sailed for Honolulu.
Aboard were two sailors from the Nantucket who could have told him that they had seen their
second mate "taken out of a whaleboat by a foul line and drowned".[69] The model for the
Whaleman's Chapel of chapter 7 is the Seamen's Bethel on Johnny Cake Hill. Melville attended a
service there shortly before he shipped out on the Acushnet, and he heard a sermon by the
chaplain, 63-year-old Reverend Enoch Mudge, who is at least in part the model for Father
Mapple. Even the topic of Jonah and the Whale may be authentic, for Mudge was a contributor
to Sailor's Magazine, which printed in December 1840 the ninth of a series of sermons on
Jonah.[70]

Whaling sources

Melville's copy of Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 1839

In addition to his own experience on the whaling ship Acushnet, two actual events served as the
genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after a
sperm whale rammed her 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America. First
mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most
Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.[71]

The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick,
in the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick was rumored to have 20 or so
harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity.
One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for an article by explorer Jeremiah N.
Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine.[72]
Melville was familiar with the article, which described:

This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was
an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from
a freak of nature ... a singular consequence had resulted — he was white as wool![72]

Significantly, Reynolds writes a first-person narration that serves as a frame for the story of a
whaling captain he meets. The captain resembles Ahab and suggests a similar symbolism and
single-minded motivation in hunting this whale, in that when his crew first encounters Mocha
Dick and cowers from him, the captain rallies them:

As he drew near, with his long curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the
billows, we perceived that it was white as the surf around him; and the men stared aghast at each
other, as they uttered, in a suppressed tone, the terrible name of MOCHA DICK!

"Mocha Dick or the d----l [devil]', said I, 'this boat never sheers off from any thing that wears the
shape of a whale."[72]

Mocha Dick had over 100 encounters with whalers in the decades between 1810 and the 1830s.
He was described as being gigantic and covered in barnacles. Although he was the most famous,
Mocha Dick was not the only white whale in the sea, nor the only whale to attack hunters.[73]

While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the Union in
1807,[74] it was not until August 1851 that the whaler Ann Alexander, while hunting in the Pacific
off the Galápagos Islands, became the second vessel since the Essex to be attacked, holed, and
sunk by a whale. Melville remarked, "Ye Gods! What a commentator is this Ann Alexander
whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has
raised this monster."[75]

While Melville had already drawn on his different sailing experiences in his previous novels,
such as Mardi, he had never focused specifically on whaling. The 18 months he spent as an
ordinary seaman aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841–42, and one incident in particular, now
served as inspiration. During a mid-ocean "gam" (rendezvous at sea between ships), he met
Chase's son William, who lent him his father's book. Melville later wrote:

I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; ... he went to his chest & handed me a
complete copy ... of the Narrative [of the Essex catastrophe]. This was the first printed account of
it I had ever seen. The reading of this wondrous story on the landless sea, and so close to the very
latitude of the shipwreck, had a surprising effect upon me.[76]

The book was out of print, and rare. Melville let his interest in the book be known to his father-
in-law, Lemuel Shaw, whose friend in Nantucket procured an imperfect but clean copy which
Shaw gave to Melville in April 1851. Melville read this copy avidly, made copious notes in it,
and had it bound, keeping it in his library for the rest of his life. [77]
Herman Melville

Moby-Dick contains large sections—most of them narrated by Ishmael—that seemingly have

nothing to do with the plot, but describe aspects of the whaling business. Although a successful
earlier novel about Nantucket whalers had been written, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman
(1835) by Joseph C. Hart,[78] which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work,
most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny, and Melville believed
that no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in as fascinating or immediate a
way as he had experienced it.

Melville found the bulk of his data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of
which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, Natural History of the Sperm Whale
(1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850.[79] "In scale and
complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of [this source] to the
composition of Moby-Dick surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is
known to have drawn."[80] According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, the general influence of this
source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings.[81] Melville followed
Beale's grouping closely, yet adapted it to what art demanded, and he changed the original's
prosaic phrases into graphic figures of speech.[82] The second most important whaling book is
Frederick Debell Bennett, A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from the Year 1833 to 1836
(1840), from which Melville also took the chapter organization, but in a lesser degree than he
learned from Beale.[82]

The third book was the one Melville reviewed for the Literary World in 1847, J. Ross Browne's
Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), which may have given Melville the first thought for a
whaling book, and in any case contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in Moby-
Dick.[83] The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's The Whale and His Captors (1850), was
used for two episodes in Moby-Dick but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to
be of much more use.[83] Melville did plunder a fifth book, William Scoresby, Jr., An Account of
the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (1820),
though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm
whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication,
Melville satirized and parodied it on several occasions—for instance in the description of
narwhales in the chapter "Cetology", where he called Scoresby "Charley Coffin" and gave his
account "a humorous twist of fact": "Scoresby will help out Melville several times, and on each
occasion Melville will satirize him under a pseudonym." Vincent suggests several reasons for
Melville's attitude towards Scoresby, including his dryness and abundance of irrelevant data, but
the major reason seems to have been that the Greenland whale was the sperm whale's closest
competitor for the public's attention, so Melville felt obliged to dismiss anything dealing with
it.[84]

Composition

The earliest surviving mention of the composition of what became Moby-Dick[85][86] is the final
paragraph of the letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850:

About the "whaling voyage" — I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion
so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know;
tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to
cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing,
must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the
thing, spite of this.[87]

Some scholars have concluded that Melville composed Moby-Dick in two or even three stages.
Reasoning from a series of inconsistencies and structural developments in the final version, they
hypothesize that the work he mentioned to Dana was, in the words of Lawrence Buell, a
"relatively straightforward" whaling adventure, but that reading Shakespeare and his encounters
with Hawthorne inspired him to rewrite it as "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions".[88]
Bezanson objects that the letter contains too many ambiguities to assume "that Dana's
'suggestion' would obviously be that Melville do for whaling what he had done for life on a man-
of-war in White-Jacket".[85]

In addition, Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic story telling
when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that
captured that gift".[85] And the long sentence in the middle of the above quotation simply
acknowledges that Melville is struggling with the problem, not of choosing between fact and
fancy but of how to interrelate them. The most positive statements are that it will be a strange
sort of a book and that Melville means to give the truth of the thing, but what thing exactly is not
clear.[85]

Melville may have found the plot before writing or developed it after the writing process was
underway. Considering his elaborate use of sources, "it is safe to say" that they helped him shape
the narrative, its plot included.[89] Scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer cite the
development of the character Ishmael as another factor which prolonged Melville's process of
composition and which can be deduced from the structure of the final version of the book.
Ishmael, in the early chapters, is simply the narrator, just as the narrators in Melville's earlier sea
adventures had been, but in later chapters becomes a mystical stage manager who is central to
the tragedy.[90]

Less than two months after mentioning the project to Dana, Melville reported in a letter of June
27 to Richard Bentley, his English publisher:

My Dear Sir, — In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I
write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure,
founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the
author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.[91]

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox,
Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850.[92] He became friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
and Melville beginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual
friend.[93] Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from
an Old Manse titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in The Literary World on
August 17 and 24.[94] Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and
intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and
should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".[85] In the essay, Melville compares
Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the
word "genius", the more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that
Shakespeare's "unapproachability" is nonsense for an American.[85]

Arrowhead, the house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in which Melville worked on Moby-Dick.

The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850–1851, when Melville
had changed the noise of New York City for a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The move may
well have delayed finishing the book.[95] During these months, he wrote several excited letters to
Hawthorne, including one of June 1851 in which he summarizes his career: "What I feel most
moved to write, that is banned, — it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.
So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."[96]

This is the stubborn Melville who stood by Mardi and talked about his other, more commercial
books with contempt. The letter also reveals how Melville experienced his development from his
25th year: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not
unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that
shortly the flower must fall to the mould."[97]
One other theory holds that getting to know Hawthorne first inspired him to write Ahab's tragic
obsession into the book, but Bryant and Springer object that Melville already had experienced
other encounters which could just as well have triggered his imagination, such as the Bible's
Jonah and Job, Milton's Satan, Shakespeare's King Lear, Byron's heroes.[90]

Theories of the composition of the book have been harpooned in three ways, first by raising
objections against the use of evidence and the evidence itself. Scholar Robert Milder sees
"insufficient evidence and doubtful methodology" at work.[98] John Bryant finds "little concrete
evidence, and nothing at all conclusive, to show that Melville radically altered the structure or
conception of the book".[99] A second type of objection is based upon Melville's intellectual
development. Bezanson is not convinced that before he met Hawthorne, "Melville was not ready
for the kind of book Moby-Dick became",[85] because in his letters from the time Melville
denounces his last two "straight narratives, Redburn and White-Jacket, as two books written just
for the money, and he firmly stood by Mardi as the kind of book he believed in. His language is
already "richly steeped in 17th-century mannerisms", characteristics of Moby-Dick. A third type
calls upon the literary nature of passages used as evidence. According to Milder, the cetological
chapters cannot be leftovers from an earlier stage of composition and any theory that they are
"will eventually founder on the stubborn meaningfulness of these chapters", because no scholar
adhering to the theory has yet explained how these chapters "can bear intimate thematic relation
to a symbolic story not yet conceived".[100]

Buell finds that theories based on a combination of selected passages from letters and what are
perceived as "loose ends" in the book not only "tend to dissolve into guesswork", but he also
suggests that these so-called loose ends may be intended by the author: repeatedly the book
mentions "the necessary unfinishedness of immense endeavors". Despite all this, Buell finds the
evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing".[88]

Publication history
Melville first proposed the English publication in a 27 June 1850 letter to Richard Bentley,
London publisher of his earlier works. Textual scholar G. Thomas Tanselle explains that for
these earlier books, American proof sheets had been sent to the English publisher and that
publication in the United States had been held off until the work had been set in type and
published in England. This procedure was intended to provide the best (though still uncertain)
claim for the English copyright of an American work.[101] In the case of Moby-Dick, Melville had
taken almost a year longer than promised, and could not rely on Harpers to prepare the proofs as
they had done for the earlier books. Indeed, Harpers had denied him an advance, and since he
was already in debt to them for almost $700, he was forced to borrow money and to arrange for
the typesetting and plating himself.[102] John Bryant suggests that he did so "to reduce the
number of hands playing with his text".[103]

The final stages of composition overlapped with the early stages of publication. In June 1851,
Melville wrote to Hawthorne that he was in New York to "work and slave on my 'Whale' while it
is driving through the press".[104] By the end of the month, "wearied with the long delay of
printers", Melville came back to finish work on the book in Pittsfield. Three weeks later, the
typesetting was almost done, as he announced to Bentley on 20 July: "I am now passing thro' the
press, the closing sheets of my new work".[104] While Melville was simultaneously writing and
proofreading what had been set, the corrected proof would be plated, that is, the type fixed in
final form. Since earlier chapters were already plated when he was revising the later ones,
Melville must have "felt restricted in the kinds of revisions that were feasible".[105]

On 3 July 1851, Bentley offered Melville ₤150 and "half profits", that is, half the profits that
remained after the expenses of production and advertising. On 20 July, Melville accepted, after
which Bentley drew up a contract on 13 August.[106] Melville signed and returned the contract in
early September, and then went to New York with the proof sheets, made from the finished
plates, which he sent to London by his brother Allan on 10 September. For over a month, these
proofs had been in Melville's possession, and because the book would be set anew in England, he
could devote all his time to correcting and revising them. He still had no American publisher, so
the usual hurry about getting the English publication to precede the American was not
present.[107] Only on 12 September was the Harper publishing contract signed.[108] Bentley
received the proof sheets with Melville's corrections and revisions marked on them on September
24. He published the book less than four weeks later.

In the October 1851 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine "The Town Ho's Story" was
published, with a footnote reading: "From 'The Whale'. The title of a new work by Mr. Melville,
in the press of Harper and Brothers, and now publishing in London by Mr. Bentley."[109]

On 18 October, the English edition, The Whale, was published in a printing of only 500 copies,
fewer than Melville's previous books. Their slow sales had convinced Bentley that a smaller
number was more realistic. The London Morning Herald on October 20 printed the earliest
known review.[110] On 14 November, the American edition, Moby-Dick, was published and the
same day reviewed in both the Albany Argus and the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer.
On 19 November, Washington received the copy to be deposited for copyright purposes. The
first American printing of 2,915 copies was almost the same as the first of Mardi, but the first
printing of Melville's other three Harper books had been a thousand copies more.[111]

Melville's revisions and British editorial revisions

The English edition, set by Bentley's printers from the American page proofs with Melville's
revisions and corrections, differs from the American edition in over 700 wordings and thousands
of punctuation and spelling changes.[107]

Excluding the preliminaries and the one extract, the three volumes of the English edition came to
927 pages[112] and the single American volume to 635 pages.[113] Accordingly, the dedication to
Hawthorne in the American edition — "this book is inscribed to"— became "these volumes are
inscribed to" in the English.[114] The table of contents in the English edition generally follows the
actual chapter titles in the American edition, but 19 titles in the American table of contents differ
from the titles above the chapters themselves. This list was probably drawn up by Melville
himself: the titles of chapters describing encounters of the Pequod with other ships had—
apparently to stress the parallelisms between these chapters—been standardized to "The Pequod
meets the ...," with the exception of the already published 'The Town-Ho's Story'.[115]
For unknown reasons, the "Etymology" and "Extracts" were moved to the end of the third
volume.[116] An epigraph from Paradise Lost, taken from the second of the two quotations from
that work in the American edition, appears on the title page of each of the three English volumes.
Melville's involvement with this rearrangement is not clear: if it was Bentley's gesture toward
accommodating Melville, as Tanselle suggests,[116] its selection put an emphasis on the quotation
Melville may not have agreed with.

The largest of Melville's revisions is the addition to the English edition of a 139-word footnote in
Chapter 87 explaining the word "gally". The edition also contains six short phrases and some 60
single words lacking in the American edition.[117] In addition, about 35 changes produce genuine
improvements, as opposed to mere corrections: "Melville may not have made every one of the
changes in this category, but it seems certain that he was responsible for the great majority of
them."[118]

British censorship and missing "Epilogue"

The British publisher hired one or more revisers who were, in the evaluation of scholar Steven
Olsen-Smith, responsible for "unauthorized changes ranging from typographical errors and
omissions to acts of outright censorship".[119] According to biographer Robertson-Lorant, the
result was that the English edition was "badly mutilated".[120] The expurgations fall into four
categories, ranked according to the apparent priorities of the censor:

1. Sacrilegious passages, more than 1200 words: Attributing human failures to God was
grounds for excision or revision, as was comparing human shortcomings to divine ones.
For example, in chapter 28, "Ahab", Ahab stands with "a crucifixion" in his face" was
revised to "an apparently eternal anguish";[121]
2. Sexual matters, including the sex life of whales and even Ishmael's worried anticipation
of the nature of Queequeg's underwear, as well as allusions to fornication or harlots, and
"our hearts' honeymoon" (in relation to Ishmael and Queequeg)[122] Chapter 95, however,
"The Cassock", referring to the whale's genital organ, was untouched, perhaps because of
Melville's indirect language.
3. Remarks "belittling royalty or implying a criticism of the British": This meant the
exclusion of the complete chapter 25, a "Postscript" on the use of sperm oil at
coronations;[123]
4. Perceived grammatical or stylistic anomalies were treated with "a highly conservative
interpretation of rules of 'correctness'".[124]

These expurgations also meant that any corrections or revisions Melville may have marked upon
these passages are now lost.

The final difference in the material not already plated is that the "Epilogue", thus Ishmael's
miraculous survival, is omitted from the British edition. Obviously, the epilogue was not an
afterthought supplied too late for the English edition, for it is referred to in "The Castaway": "in
the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself."[125] Why
the "Epilogue" is missing is unknown. Since nothing objectionable was in it, most likely it was
somehow lost by Bentley's printer when the "Etymology" and "Extracts" were moved.[126]
Last-minute change of title

After the sheets had been sent, Melville changed the title. Probably late in September, Allan sent
Bentley two pages of proof with a letter of which only a draft survives which informed him that
Melville "has determined upon a new title & dedication—Enclosed you have proof of both—It is
thought here that the new title will be a better selling title". After expressing his hope that
Bentley would receive this change in time, Allan said that "Moby-Dick is a legitimate title for
the book, being the name given to a particular whale who if I may so express myself is the hero
of the volume".[127] Biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the reason for the change was that
Harper's had two years earlier published a book with a similar title, The Whale and His
Captors.[128]

Changing the title was not a problem for the American edition, since the running heads
throughout the book only showed the titles of the chapters, and the title page, which would
include the publisher's name, could not be printed until a publisher was found. In October
Harper's New Monthly Magazine printed chapter 54, "The Town-Ho's Story", with a footnote
saying: "From The Whale. The title of a new work by Mr. Melville".[127] The one surviving leaf
of proof, "a 'trial' page bearing the title 'The Whale' and the Harper imprint,"[129] shows that at
this point, after the publisher had been found, the original title still stood. When Allan's letter
arrived, no sooner than early October, Bentley had already announced The Whale in both the
Athenaem and the Spectator of 4 and 11 October.[130] Probably to accommodate Melville,
Bentley inserted a half-title page in the first volume only, which reads "The Whale; or, Moby
Dick".[129]

Sales and earnings

The British printing of 500 copies sold fewer than 300 within the first four months. In 1852,
some remaining sheets were bound in a cheaper casing, and in 1853, enough sheets were still left
to issue a cheap edition in one volume. Bentley recovered only half on the ₤150 he advanced
Melville, whose share from actual sales would have been just ₤38, and he did not print a new
edition.[131] Harper's first printing was 2,915 copies, including the standard 125 review copies.
The selling price was $1.50, about a fifth of the price of the British three-volume edition.[113]

About 1,500 copies were sold within 11 days, and then sales slowed down to less than 300 the
next year. After three years, the first edition was still available, almost 300 copies of which were
lost when a fire broke out at the firm in December 1853. In 1855, a second printing of 250 copies
was issued, in 1863, a third of 253 copies, and finally in 1871, a fourth printing of 277 copies,
which sold so slowly that no new printing was ordered.[131] Moby-Dick was out of print during
the last four years of Melville's life, having sold 2,300 in its first year and a half and on average
27 copies a year for the next 34 years, totaling 3,215 copies.

Melville's earnings from the book add up to $1,260: the ₤150 advance from Bentley was
equivalent to $703, and the American printings earned him $556, which was $100 less than he
earned from any of his five previous books.[132] Melville's widow received another $81 when the
United States Book Company issued the book and sold almost 1,800 copies between 1892 and
1898.[132]
Reception
The reception of The Whale in Britain and of Moby-Dick in the United States differed in two
ways, according to Parker. First, British literary criticism was more sophisticated and developed
than in the still young republic, with British reviewing done by "cadres of brilliant literary
people"[133] who were "experienced critics and trenchant prose stylists",[134] while the United
States had only "a handful of reviewers" capable enough to be called critics, and American
editors and reviewers habitually echoed British opinion.[133] American reviewing was mostly
delegated to "newspaper staffers" or else by "amateur contributors more noted for religious piety
than critical acumen."[134] Second, the differences between the two editions caused "two distinct
critical receptions."[135]

British

Twenty-one reviews appeared in London, and later one in Dublin.[134] The British reviewers,
according to Parker, mostly regarded The Whale as "a phenomenal literary work, a philosophical,
metaphysical, and poetic romance".[136] The Morning Advertiser for October 24 was in awe of
Melville's learning, of his "dramatic ability for producing a prose poem", and of the whale
adventures which were "powerful in their cumulated horrors."[137] To its surprise, John Bull
found "philosophy in whales" and "poetry in blubber", and concluded that few books that
claimed to be either philosophical or literary works "contain as much true philosophy and as
much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedition", making it a work "far
beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction".[138] The Morning Post found it "one of the
cleverest, wittiest, and most amusing of modern books", and predicted that it was a book "which
will do great things for the literary reputation of its author".[138]

Melville himself never saw these reviews, and Parker calls it a "bitter irony" that the reception
overseas was "all he could possibly have hoped for, short of a few conspicuous proclamations
that the distance between him and Shakespeare was by no means immeasurable."[139]

One of the earliest reviews, by the extremely conservative critic Henry Chorley[120] in the highly
regarded London Athenaeum, described it as

[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and
collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of
composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its
catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.

According to the London Literary Gazette and Journal of Science and Art for December 6, 1851,
"Mr. Melville cannot do without savages, so he makes half of his dramatis personae wild
Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities", who appeared in "an odd book, professing to be
a novel; wantonly eccentric, outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly
descriptive".[140] Most critics regretted the extravagant digressions because they distracted from
an otherwise interesting and even exciting narrative, but even critics who did not like the book as
a whole recognized the genius evident in Melville's originality of imagination and expression.[141]
One problem was that since the English edition omitted the epilogue, British reviewers read a
book with a first-person narrator who apparently did not survive to tell the tale.[136] The reviewer
of the Literary Gazette asked how Ishmael, "who appears to have been drowned with the rest,
communicated his notes to Mr. Bentley".[140] The reviewer in the Spectator objected that
"nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to
have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish."[142]
The Dublin University Magazine asked "how does it happen that the author is alive to tell the
story?" and the Literary Gazette declared that how the writer, "who appears to have been
drowned with the rest, communicated his notes for publication to Mr. Bentley is not
explained".[142] A few other reviewers, who did not comment upon the apparent impossibility of
Ishmael telling the story, pointed out violations of narrative conventions in other passages.

Other reviewers were fascinated enough with the book to accept its perceived flaws. John Bull
praised the author for making literature out of unlikely and even unattractive matter, and the
Morning Post found that delight far oustripped the improbable character of events.[143] Though
some reviewers viewed the characters, especially Ahab, as exaggerated, many understood it took
an extraordinary character to undertake the battle with the white whale. Melville's style was
usually praised regardless of the reviewer's judgment of the book, but some perceived the same
tendency to over-doing here, and some found his style too American.[144]

American

Some sixty reviews appeared in America, the criterion for counting as a review being more than
two lines of comment.[145] Only a couple of reviewers expressed themselves early enough not to
be influenced by news of the British reception.[133] Though Moby-Dick did contain the Epilogue
and so accounted for Ishmael's survival, the British reviews influenced the American reception.
The earliest American review, in the Boston Post for November 20, quoted the London
Athenaeum's scornful review, not realizing that some of the criticism of The Whale did not
pertain to Moby-Dick. This last point, and the authority and influence of British criticism in
American reviewing, is clear from the review's opening: "We have read nearly one half of this
book, and are satisfied that the London Athenaeum is right in calling it 'an ill-compounded
mixture of romance and matter-of-fact'".[146] Though the Post quoted the greater portion of the
review, it omitted the condensed extract of Melville's prose the Athenaeum had included to give
readers an example of it. The Post deemed the price of one dollar and fifty cents far too much:
"'The Whale' is not worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed
paper".[147]

The New York North American Miscellany for December summarized the verdict in the
Athenaeum. The reviewer of the December New York Eclectic Magazine had actually read
Moby-Dick in full, and was puzzled why the Athenaeum was so scornful of the ending. The
attack on The Whale by the Spectator was reprinted in the December New York International
Magazine, which inaugurated the influence of another unfavorable review. Rounding off what
American readers were told about the British reception, in January Harper's Monthly Magazine
attempted some damage control, and wrote that the book had "excited a general interest" among
the London magazines.[148]
The most influential American review, ranked according to the number of references to it,
appeared in the weekly magazine Literary World, which had printed Melville's "Mosses" essay
the preceding year. The author of the unsigned review in two installments, on 15 and 22
November, was later identified as publisher Evert Duyckinck.[149] The first half of the first
installment was devoted to an event of remarkable coincidence: early in the month, between the
publishing of the British and the American edition, a whale had sunk the New Bedford whaler
Ann Alexander near Chile.[150]

In the second installment, Duyckinck described Moby-Dick as three books rolled into one: he
was pleased with the book as far as it was a thorough account of the sperm whale, less so with it
as far as the adventures of the Pequod crew were considered, perceiving the characters as
unrealistic and expressing inappropriate opinions on religions, and condemned the essayistic
rhapsodizing and moralizing with what he thought was little respect of what "must be to the
world the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced."[151] The review prompted
Hawthorne to take the "unusually aggressive step of reproving Duyckinck" by criticizing the
review in a letter to Duyckinck of December 1:[152]

What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding
ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best
points.[153]

The Transendental socialist George Ripley published a review in the New York Tribune for 22
November, in which he compared the book favorably to Mardi, because the "occasional touches
of the subtle mysticism" was not carried on to excess but kept within boundaries by the solid
realism of the whaling context.[154] Ripley was almost surely also the author of the review in
Harper's for December, which saw in Ahab's quest the "slight framework" for something else:
"Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory,
intended to illustrate the mystery of human life."[155] Among the handful of other favorable
reviews was one in the Albion on 22 November which saw the book as a blend of truth and
satire.[156]

Melville's friend Nathaniel Parker Willis, reviewing the book in the 29 November Home Journal,
found it "a very racy, spirited, curious and entertaining book ... it enlists the curiosity, excites the
sympathies, and often charms the fancy".[155] In the 6 December Spirit of the Times, editor
William T. Porter praised the book, and all of Melville's five earlier works, as the writings "of a
man who is at once philosopher, painter, and poet".[155] Some other, shorter reviews mixed their
praise with genuine reservations about the "irreverence and profane jesting", as the New Haven
Daily Palladium for 17 November phrased it. Many reviewers, Parker observes, had come to the
conclusion that Melville was capable of producing enjoyable romances, but they could not see in
him the author of great literature.[157]

Legacy and adaptations

Main article: Adaptations of Moby-Dick
Within a year after Melville's death, Moby-Dick, along with Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, was
reprinted by Harper & Brothers, giving it a chance to be rediscovered. However, only New
York's literary underground showed interest, just enough to keep Melville's name circulating for
the next 25 years in the capital of American publishing. During this time, a few critics were
willing to devote time, space, and a modicum of praise to Melville and his works, or at least
those that could still be easily obtained or remembered. Other works, especially the poetry, went
largely forgotten.[158]

In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about
Melville's value. His 1921 study, The American Novel, called Moby-Dick a pinnacle of American
Romanticism.[158]

In his 1923 idiosyncratic but influential Studies in Classic American Literature, novelist, poet,
and short story writer D. H. Lawrence celebrated the originality and value of American authors,
among them Melville. Perhaps surprisingly, Lawrence saw Moby-Dick as a work of the first
order despite his using the expurgated original English edition which also lacked the
epilogue.[158]

The Modern Library brought out Moby-Dick in 1926 and the Lakeside Press in Chicago
commissioned Rockwell Kent to design and illustrate a striking three-volume edition which
appeared in 1930. Random House then issued a one-volume trade version of Kent's edition,
which in 1943 they reprinted as a less expensive Modern Library Giant.[159]

The novel has been adapted or represented in art, film, books, cartoons, television, and more than
a dozen versions in comic-book format. The first adaptation was the 1926 silent movie The Sea
Beast, starring John Barrymore,[160] in which Ahab returns to marry his fiancée after killing the
whale.[161] The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a
screenplay by author Ray Bradbury.[162] The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put
it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast
seemed to capture the popular imagination." They conclude that "different readers in different
periods of popular culture have rewritten Moby-Dick" to make it a "true cultural icon".[161]
American artist David Klamen has cited the novel as an important influence on his dark, slow-to-
disclose paintings, noting a passage in the book in which a mysterious, undecipherable painting
in a bar is gradually revealed to depict a whale.[163]

American author Ralph Ellison wrote a tribute to the book in the prologue of his 1952 novel
Invisible Man. The narrator remembers a moment of truth under the influence of marijuana and
evokes a church service: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of
Blackness.' And the congregation answers: 'That blackness is most black, brother, most black ...
'" This scene, Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad observes, "reprises a moment in the second
chapter of Moby-Dick", where Ishmael wanders around New Bedford looking for a place to
spend the night, and momentarily joins a congregation: "It was a negro church; and the
preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-
gnashing there." According to Rampersad, it was Melville who "empowered Ellison to insist on a
place in the American literary tradition" by his example of "representing the complexity of race
and racism so acutely and generously in his text".[164] Rampersaf also believes Ellison's choice of
a first-person narrator was inspired above all by Moby-Dick, and the novel even has a similar
opening sentence with the narrator introducing himself ("I am an invisible man").[165] The oration
by Ellison's blind preacher Barbee resembles Father Mapple's sermon in that both prepare the
reader for what is to come.[166]

American songwriter Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of 2017 cited Moby-Dick as
one of the three books that influenced him most. Dylan's description ends with an
acknowledgment: "That theme, and all that it implies, would work its way into more than a few
of my songs."[167]