Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book centers on the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, 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 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, 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". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850 and finished 18 months later, a year after he had anticipated. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. The white whale is modeled on a 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 sailing, 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.
The book's literary influences include Shakespeare, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Thomas Browne and the Bible. 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 August 1850, with the manuscript perhaps half finished, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and was deeply impressed by his Mosses from an Old Manse, which he compared to Shakespeare in its cosmic ambitions. This encounter may have inspired him to revise and deepen Moby-Dick, which is dedicated to Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius".
The book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, in a single-volume edition in New York in November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as "Moby Dick", without the hyphen. Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable,
Plot
thumb|[[Moby Dick (whale)|Moby Dick attacking a whaling boat]]
thumb|The illustration of [[Queequeg in a 1902 edition]]
thumb|Moby Dick in a 1902 edition
Ishmael narrates his December travels from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage as a green hand. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with a tattooed Polynesian cannibal named 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 and a man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. Shadowy figures board the ship while provisions are loaded, and on a cold Christmas Day, the Pequod departs the harbor.
Ishmael begins the journey with an extensive discussion of cetology, his system for the zoological classification and natural history of the whale. He also introduces each of the crew members—the chief mate 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker and realist; his harpooneer Queequeg; second mate Stubb, a cheerful man from Cape Cod; Stubb's proud harpooneer Tashtego, a pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head; the third mate Flask from Martha's Vineyard; and Flask's harpooneer Daggoo, a tall African.
When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck, he announces he seeks revenge on the white whale that took his leg from the knee down, leaving him with a prosthesis fashioned from a whale's jawbone. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, which he nails to the mast. Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit, but Ahab's purpose exercises a mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine."
Traveling from Nantucket to the Azores, Ahab then turns southwest and sails along the coast of South America. But instead of rounding Cape Horn at its tip, he heads to the Pacific Ocean in the other direction. Heading east towards equatorial Africa, he sails around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa and into the Indian Ocean.
As the ship is en route to Africa, Tashtego sights a sperm whale on the horizon. The five shadowy figures from earlier appear on deck and are revealed as a special crew specially selected by Ahab. Their leader is a Parsee named Fedallah who serves as Ahab's harpooneer. A pursuit of the whale ensues but is unsuccessful.
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 Ishmael 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, the concealed story of a "judgment of God" is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer was flogged, and when the punishing officer later led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale.
Ishmael digresses on pictures of whales, brit, squid and—after four boats are 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 Pequods 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 endemic infection.
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 later 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 is Kantean, platonic. Tashtego cuts into the head of the sperm whale and retrieves buckets of spermaceti. He falls into the head, which in turn falls off the yardarm into the sea. Queequeg dives after him and frees Tashtego 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 Pequods 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 continuing, but Ahab orders him away. Days later, Pip, a little African American cabin-boy, jumps in panic from Stubb's whale boat and the whale must be cut loose because Pip is entangled in the line; a few days later Pip again jumps in panic, is left alone in the sea, and has gone insane by the time they find him.
The crew spends time processing various harvested whale parts—liquifying congealed spermaceti, boiling blubber, decanting warm oil into casks, stowing them in cargo, and scrubbing the decks.
Ishmael discusses the symbolism in the coin hammered to the main mast, which shows three Andes summits: one with a flame, another a tower, the third a crowing cock. Ahab looks at the doubloon and interprets the mountains as his volcanic energy, firmness, and victory; Starbuck takes the high peaks as the Trinity; Stubb focuses on the zodiacal arch over the mountains; and Flask sees no meaning. The Manxman mutters in front of the mast, and Pip declines when he is told to look.
The Pequod next gams with the Samuel Enderby of London, captained by Boomer, who lost his right arm to the whale but still carries it no ill will. His ship's surgeon, Dr. Bunger, describes the animal not as malicious, but awkward. Ahab puts an end to the gam by rushing back to his ship.
Ishmael then discusses the evolution of whales, specifically discussing a glen in Tranque of the Arsacides Islands full of carved whale bones and fossilized whales where one can see the decreasing size of their skeletons over time, and he considers the possibility of whale extinction.
Leaving the Samuel Enderby, Ahab wrenches his ivory leg and orders the carpenter to fashion him another. Meanwhile Queequeg, sweating all day below deck, develops a chill and severe fever. The carpenter makes a coffin for the Polynesian, anticipating a burial at sea. Queequeg tries it for size as Pip sobs and beats his tambourine, standing by and calling himself a coward while he praises his companion. Queequeg suddenly rallies and returns to good health and uses his coffin as a spare seachest.
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, and dashes it to the deck. That evening, a typhoon attacks the ship and lightning strikes the mast, setting the doubloon and Ahab's harpoon aglow. Ahab delivers a speech on the 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 his musket. The 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.
The Pequod is now heading southeast toward Moby Dick. A man falls overboard from the mast. The life buoy is thrown, but both sink. Queequeg now proposes that his coffin be used as a new buoy and Starbuck has it sealed and waterproofed. The 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, but Ahab refuses to join the search.
Ahab now spends twenty-four hours a day on deck while Fedallah shadows him. One day, 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, to which Ahab flourishes his special lance and once more orders the ship forward. Ahab speaks to Starbuck about his wife and child, calling himself a fool for spending 40 years whaling, and says he can see his own child in Starbuck. Starbuck tries to persuade Ahab to return to Nantucket to meet their families, but Ahab refuses.
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 into the sea and scatters his crew. On the second day of the chase, Ahab leaves Starbuck in charge of the Pequod. Moby Dick smashes the three boats hunting him to splinters. Ahab is rescued, but his ivory leg and Fedallah are lost. Starbuck begs Ahab to stop, but the captain vows revenge.
On the third and final day of the chase, Ahab sights Moby Dick at noon as sharks appear between the ship and the whale in anticipation of the ensuing carnage. Ahab lowers his boat for the 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, making Moby Dick the "hearse not made by human hands" Fedallah had prophesied earlier.
Ahab plants his harpoon in the whale's flank and Moby Dick destroys the Pequod, tossing its men into the sea. Ishmael is unable to return to the boat and is left behind in the water. Ahab then realizes the destroyed ship is the second hearse of American wood from Fedallah's prophecy.
Moby Dick returns within a few yards of Ahab's boat and a harpoon is darted from the ship but its line tangles. As Ahab stoops to free it, the line loops around his neck, ensnaring him against his nemesis and completing Fedallah's augury. As the wounded whale swims away, the captain is drawn with him out of sight. Queequeg's coffin comes to the surface as the only thing to escape the vortex when the Pequod sinks. Ishmael floats on it for a day and a night until the Rachel, still looking for its lost seamen, rescues him.
Structure
Point of view
Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with the use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings. 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." Scholar John Bryant calls him the novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice". Walter Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls "forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown older".
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 color 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".
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 Pequods 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.
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".
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. As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education".
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. 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. 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". He calls Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre "a Nabokovian touch".
Nine meetings with other ships
A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings 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. 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".
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).
Themes
An early enthusiast for the Melville Revival, the English author E. M. Forster remarked in 1927: "Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem." Yet he saw as "the essential" in the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent" beneath the surface action and morality. The hunt for the whale can be seen as a metaphor for an epistemological questin the words of biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant, "man's search for meaning in a world of deceptive appearances and fatal delusions". Ishmael's taxonomy of whales merely demonstrates "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of achieving certainty". She also contrasts Ishmael's 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.
Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco cites race as an example of this search for truth beneath surface differences, noting that all races are represented among the crew members of the Pequod. Although Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed possible cannibal, he soon decides that he would "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." 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 carried primarily by Pip, the diminutive Black cabin boy. When Pip has almost drowned, and 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!'".
Editors Bryant and Springer suggest that perception is a central themethe 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". 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. His views of property are another example of wrestling with moral choice. In Chapter 89, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish", Ishmael expounds the legal concept "fast-fish and loose-fish", which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship; he compares the concept to various forms of domination, such as slavery, serfdom, tithes and military conquest.
The novel has also been read as critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement Transcendentalism, attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. 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 possible justification for egoism. Richard Chase writes that for Melville, "Deathspiritual, emotional, physicalis 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." 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".
Style
"Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, Moby-Dick is language: "nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic and unceasingly allusive". Melville stretches grammar, quotes well-known or obscure sources, or swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism. Melville coined words, critic Newton Arvin recognizes, as if the English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things he 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". 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". For Arvin, the essence of the writing style of Moby-Dick lies in
<blockquote>the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's styleso that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half unreal onethis is the prime characteristic of his language. No feature of it could express more tellingly the awareness that lies below and behind Moby-Dickthe awareness that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one underlying reality.</blockquote>
Later critics have expanded Arvin's categories. The superabundant vocabulary can be broken down into strategies used individually and in combination. First, the original modification of words as "Leviathanism" and the exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin"). Second, the use of existing words in new ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks". 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 ...").
The novel uses several levels of rhetoric. The simplest is "a relatively straightforward expository style", such as in the cetological chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and serve chiefly as transitions" between more sophisticated levels. A second level is the "poetic", such as in Ahab's quarterdeck monologue, to the point that it can be set as blank verse. Set over a metrical pattern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose", Bezanson suggests. A third level 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:
<blockquote>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 business, 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.<br />
("Nantucket", Ch. 14).</blockquote>
Bezanson calls this chapter a comical "prose poem" that blends "high and low with a relaxed assurance". Similar passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual democracy" in the middle of "Knights and Squires".
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). A paragraph-long simile describes how the 30 men of the crew became a single unit:
<blockquote>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.<br />
("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134).</blockquote>
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: 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.
Assimilation of Shakespeare
F. O. Matthiessen, in 1941, declared that Melville's "possession by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences" in that it made Melville discover his own full strength "through the challenge of the most abundant imagination in history". This insight was then reinforced by the study of Melville's annotations in his reading copy of Shakespeare, which show that he immersed himself in Shakespeare when he was preparing for Moby-Dick, especially King Lear and Macbeth. Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, was "a catalytic agent", one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces".
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". 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".</blockquote>
Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gave Moby-Dick "a kind of diction that depended upon no source", and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life". The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on "a sense of speech rhythm".
Matthiessen finds debts to Shakespeare, whether hard or easy to recognize, on almost every page. He points out that the phrase "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echoes the famous phrase in Macbeth: "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
In addition to this sense of rhythm, Matthiessen shows that Melville "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself dramatic".
- The Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds was not lost on him ("full-freighted").
- Finally: Melville learned how to handle "the quickened sense of life that comes from making one part of speech act as anotherfor example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or the coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun".
Thomas Carlyle
Critics have seen parallels between Moby Dick and Thomas Carlyle's work, particularly Sartor Resartus (1833–34), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) and the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, which Melville read while writing the novel. James Barbour and biographer Leon Howard write that "Carlyle's rhetoric is reflected" in much of the dialogue of Ahab and Ishmael, while Melville uses Sartors philosophical concepts of "an emblematic universe" and a "weaver god" "almost in Carlyle's words". Alexander Welsh argues that Carlyle figured "largely in the undertaking of Moby Dick", noting that the "figure of the sheep in 'The Funeral' ... is taken directly from Carlyle", specifically the essay "Boswell's Life of Johnson" (1832) and that the "language of herring and whales, fleets and commodores" may have been borrowed from Sartor. According to Paul Giles, Sartor "furnished Melville with a prototype for his playful iconoclastic style in Moby-Dick", particularly in its narrative strategy and romantic ironic paradoxes. The "shared use of the clothing metaphor" is also inspired by Sartor.
Jonathan Arac sees in Moby-Dick "a direct appropriation" of Carlyle's "Hero". "Ahab", writes Arac, "is very much a Carlylean hero", which Carlyle's "romantic image of Cromwell helped Melville to create". Carlyle's portraits of Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare in "The Hero as Poet", the third lecture of On Heroes, "offered models that helped Melville to develop as a reader and to achieve the definition of himself as a writer that made Moby-Dick possible".
Renaissance humanism
During the composition of Moby-Dick Melville also read Renaissance humanists such as Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Rabelais. Hershel Parker notes that Melville adopted not only their poetic and conversational prose styles, but also their skeptical attitudes towards religion. Browne's statement "I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an ob altitudo" mirrors both in ethos and poetics Ishmael's "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it."
Ishmael also mirrors the epistemological uncertainty of Renaissance humanists. For example, Browne argues that "where there is an obscurity too deepe for our reason ... [reason] becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtilties of faith.... I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when God forbids it, 'tis positivley said, the plants of the field were not yet growne." Ishmael similarly embraces paradox when he proclaims "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."
Scholars have also called attention to similarities between Melville's style and that of Robert Burton in Anatomy of Melancholy. William Engel notes that Melville had Burton's book at his side, and says "this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice." Additionally, Hershel Parker writes that in 1847, Anatomy of Melancholy served as Melville's "sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and in the following year he bought a set of Michel de Montaigne's works. In the Essays he found "a worldly wise skepticism that braced him against the superficial pieties demanded by his time". Melville then read Browne's Religio Medici which he adored, describing Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel'".
Background
Autobiographical elements
Moby-Dick draws on Melville's experience on the whaler Acushnet, but is not autobiographical. On December 30, 1840, Melville signed on as a green hand for the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, planned to last for 52 months. Its owner, Melvin O. Bradford, like Bildad, was a Quaker: on several instances when he signed documents, he erased the word "swear" and replaced it with "affirm". However, the shareholders of the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and orphaned children.
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 Reverend Enoch Mudge, who is at least in part the inspiration for Father Mapple. Even the topic of Jonah and the Whale may be authentic, for Mudge contributed sermons on Jonah to Sailor's Magazine.
The crew was not as heterogenous or exotic as the crew of the Pequod. Five 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 black cook of the Pequod, was probably modeled on this Philadelphia-born William Maiden. A first mate, actually called Edward C. Starbuck was discharged at Tahiti under mysterious circumstances. The second mate, John Hall, is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member Henry Hubbard, who also identified the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage. Hubbard witnessed Pip's fall into the water.
Ahab seems to have had no model, though his death may have been based on an actual event. Melville was aboard The Star in May 1843 with 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".
Whaling sources
thumb|Melville's copy of Natural History of the Sperm Whale, published in 1839
thumb|A portrait of Moby-Dick author [[Herman Melville]]
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.
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 J. N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine. Melville was familiar with the article, which described: