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,Faulkner (1927) 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".Lawrence (1923), 168 Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.Buell (2014), 362 note.
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.Tanselle (1988) "Editorial Appendix", 810–12 Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable, though some objected that the tale seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship, as the British edition lacked the epilogue recounting Ishmael's survival. American reviewers were more hostile.Parker (1988), 721–722
Plot
Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford to join a whaling voyage as a green hand. At a crowded inn, he shares a bed with Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian harpooneer and son of a king from the island of Rokovoko. The next morning, they attend Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah before heading to Nantucket. Ishmael signs aboard the Pequod under Quaker owners Bildad and Peleg. Peleg describes Captain Ahab as a "grand, ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless has "his humanities". Queequeg joins the crew, and a man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. Shadowy figures board the ship, and on Christmas Day the Pequod departs.
Ishmael extensively discusses cetology and introduces the crew members: chief mate Starbuck, a realist Nantucket Quaker; cheerful second mate Stubb from Cape Cod; third mate Flask; and their harpooners Queequeg, the pure-blooded Indian Tashtego, and the African Daggoo. Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck, his leg replaced with a prosthesis fashioned from a whale's jawbone. He nails a doubloon to the mast as a reward for the first man to sight Moby Dick, the white whale which took his leg. Ahab's vow of vengeance captivates Ishmael, despite Starbuck's objection that the voyage is meant to be for profit.
The Pequod sails toward the Azores, then southwest along South America before crossing to the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope rather than rounding Cape Horn. En route, Tashtego sights a sperm whale, and the shadowy figures are revealed as Ahab's special crew, led by the Parsee Fedallah. The Pequod begins making "gams", a form of social meeting, with other ships. The Goney cannot answer Ahab's question about Moby Dick, and the Town-Ho reveals a concealed story of divine judgement involving the whale.
Stubb kills a sperm whale, and the cook Fleece delivers a sermon to the sharks feasting on the whale's carcass. Later, 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 philosophically compares the two heads: the right whale is Lockean, stoic, and the sperm whale is Kantean, platonic. Tashtego nearly drowns in the sperm whale's head while retrieving spermaceti but is rescued by Queequeg. Pip, a young black cabin-boy, twice leaps from a whale boat in terror; the second time he is abandoned at sea and is insane by the time they rescue him.
The crew processes various harvested whale parts: liquifying congealed spermaceti, boiling blubber, decanting warm oil into casks, and stowing them in cargo. Ahab interprets the doubloon's symbolism as representing his energy, firmness, and victory. In a gam with the Samuel Enderby, its captain says he lost an arm to Moby Dick yet bears no animosity. Queequeg falls ill, prompting the carpenter to make a coffin, but Queequeg recovers and uses it as a seachest. Ahab has the blacksmith forge a special harpoon tempered in the blood of his harpooners. Fedallah prophesies Ahab's death: Ahab will see two hearses (one not made by mortal hands and the other made of American wood); Fedallah will die before Ahab; and only hemp can kill Ahab.
During a typhoon, lightning strikes the mast and disorients the compass. Ahab makes a new one and orders the log be heaved, but the weathered line snaps, leaving the ship with no way to fix its location. The Rachel, commanded by a Nantucket captain, seeks survivors from one of her whaleboats which had pursued Moby Dick, including the captain's son, but Ahab refuses to join the search. In a final gam with the damaged Delight, Ahab flourishes his special harpoon and presses onward.
Ahab sights Moby Dick and claims the doubloon for himself. On the first day of the chase, the whale bites Ahab's whaleboat in two, tosses the captain into the sea and scatters his crew. On the second day, it smashes the three boats hunting it; Fedallah is killed and lashed to the whale's back, which becomes the first "hearse" of his prophecy. On the third day, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod, making it the "hearse of American wood". Ahab plants his harpoon in the whale's flank, but the line loops around his neck, dragging him to his death. Queequeg's coffin escapes the suction of the sinking Pequod. Ishmael clings to the coffin until the Rachel rescues him while still searching for her lost seamen.
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.Bezanson (1953), 644 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."Quoted in Bezanson (1953), 645 Scholar John Bryant calls him the novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice".Bryant (1998), 67–8 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". A second distinction is between either or both Ishmaels with the author Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael".Bezanson (1953), 647
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".Bezanson (1953), 653
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.
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.Buell (2014), 367
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".Bezanson (1953), 654
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.Buell (2014), 365 As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education".Milder (1988), 434