Moby Dick

''Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'' is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship '' Pequod'', for revenge against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm 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, ''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 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, Carlyle 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, 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.

Plot

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.

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'', 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 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 ''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 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 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 before he can recover more than a few handfuls. 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 jumps in panic again, and is left alone in the sea and has gone insane by the time he is picked up.

Cooled spermaceti 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".

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 his ship's surgeon, Dr. Bunger, describes 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. 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. Now Queequeg proposes that his superfluous coffin be used as a new life buoy. Starbuck orders the carpenter to seal and waterproof it. 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. 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 prophecy.

Moby Dick returns "within a few yards of Ahab's boat", a harpoon is darted, the line gets tangled, and Ahab stoops 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 a day and a night, 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.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." 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". 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".

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 ''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.

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".

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.Bryant and Springer (2007), xvi 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".

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. 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 (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".

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".

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, British 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 "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".Bryant and Springer (2007), xxii 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.

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). 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". 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 events in history, such as the European colonization of the Americas, the partitions of Poland, and the Mexican–American War.

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 potential 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 " ointsup the dangers of an exaggerated self-regard, rather than, as ... Emerson loved to do, uggestedthe vital possibilities of the self". Newton Arvin further suggests that self-reliance was, for Melville, really the " asquerade in kingly weeds ofa wild egoism, anarchic, irresponsible, and destructive".

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.Bryant and Springer (2007), xv 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

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-Dick''the awareness that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one underlying reality.

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"Lee (2006), 395 and the exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin").Berthoff (1962), 164 Second, the use of existing words in new ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks". Third, words lifted from specialized fields, as "fossiliferous". Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires"). 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 ...").

Other characteristic stylistic elements are the echoes and overtones, both imitation of distinct styles and habitual use of sources to shape his own work. His three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton.

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 quarter-deck 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:

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.

("Nantucket", Ch. 14).

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).Matthiessen (1941), 461 A 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: 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. These similes, with their astonishing "imaginative abundance," not only create dramatic movement, Matthiessen observes: "They are no less notable for breadth; and the more sustained among them, for an heroic dignity."

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".Matthiessen (1941), 424 This insight was then reinforced by the study of Melville's annotatations 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''".

Matthiessen demonstrates the extent to which Melville was in full possession of his powers in 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".

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 (1941), 430

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." Matthiessen shows that Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36), is "virtually blank verse, and can be printed as such":

In addition to this sense of rhythm, Matthiessen shows that Melville "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself dramatic". 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". 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".
* 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

Since the publication of ''Moby-Dick'' in 1851, critics have continued to notice parallels between it and the work of Thomas Carlyle, 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 ''Sartor'''s 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 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

Melville also borrowed stylistic qualities from Renaissance Humanists such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. Melville's biographer Hershel Parker notes that, during the composition of ''Moby-Dick'', Melville read Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Rabelais and 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 instance, Browne argues that "where there is an obscurity too deepe for our reason ... easonbecomes 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 noted similarities between Melville's style and that of Robert Burton in his '' Anatomy of Melancholy''. Scholar William Engel notes that "Because Melville had Robert Burton’s ''Anatomy of Melancholy'' at his side, this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice."
Additionally, Melville's biographer Hershel Parker writes that "in 1847, Robert Burton's ''Anatomy of Melancholy'' served as Melville's sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and then "in 1848 elvillebought Michel de Montaigne's works, where he read the ''Essays'', finding there a worldly wise skepticism that braced him against the superficial pieties demanded by his time". Finally, Melville then read Thomas Browne's '' Religio Medici'' which Melville 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". But 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 is identified as 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

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 Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of ''The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine''.Reynolds, J.N., "Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal", ''The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine''. 13.5, May 1839, pp. 377–392. Melville was familiar with the article, which described:

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:

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.

While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the ''Union'' in 1807, 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."

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:

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.

''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, 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. "In scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of his sourceto the composition of ''Moby-Dick'' surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is known to have drawn." According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings. 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.Vincent (1949), 130 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.

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''.Vincent (1949), 131 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. 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.

In addition to cetological works, Melville also consulted scattered literary works that mention or discuss whales, as the opening "Extracts" section of the novel demonstrates. For instance, Thomas Browne's essay "Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale" from his ''Pseudodoxia Epidemica'' is consulted not only in the extracts but also in the chapter titled "Cetology". Ishmael notes: "Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne." Browne's playful examination of whales, which values philosophical interpretations over scientifically accurate examinations, helped shape the novel's style. Browne's comment on "the perm-Whale'seyes but small, the pizell enislarge, and prominent" likely helped shape the comical chapter concerning whale penises, "The Cassock".

Composition

Scholars have concluded that Melville composed ''Moby-Dick'' in two or even three stages. Reasoning from biographical evidence, analysis of the functions of characters, and a series of unexplained but perhaps meaningful inconsistencies in the final version, they hypothesize that reading Shakespeare and his new friendship with Hawthorne, in the words of Lawrence Buell, inspired Melville to rewrite a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure into "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions".Buell (2014), 364

The earliest surviving mention of what became ''Moby-Dick'' is a letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850:

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''.Walter E. Bezanson, "''Moby-Dick'': Document, Drama, Dream," in John Bryant (ed.), ''A Companion to Melville Studies'', Greenwoord Press, 1986, 176–180. Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic storytelling when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift". 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.

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. 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.Bryant and Springer (2007), xi

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850. He met Melville on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend that included, among others, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and James T. Fields. 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. 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". 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.

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. 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."

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."

Buell finds the evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing", since the impact of Shakespeare and Hawthorne was "surely monumental", but others challenge the theories of the composition in three ways. The first raises objections on the use of evidence and the evidence itself. Bryant finds "little concrete evidence, and nothing at all conclusive, to show that Melville radically altered the structure or conception of the book". and scholar Robert Milder sees "insufficient evidence and doubtful methodology" at work. A second type of objection is based on assumptions about Melville's intellectual development. Bryant and Springer object to the conclusion that Hawthorne inspired Melville to write Ahab's tragic obsession into the book; 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. Bezanson is also not convinced that before he met Hawthorne, "Melville was ''not'' ready for the kind of book ''Moby-Dick'' became", 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".

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".

Publication history

Melville first proposed the British publication in a June 27, 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 British 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 UK copyright of an American work. 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. John Bryant suggests that he did so "to reduce the number of hands playing with his text".

The final stages of composition overlapped with the early stages of publication. At the end of May 1851, Melville delivered the bulk of his manuscript to Harper's for plating and printing of proof sheets. In June, he wrote to Hawthorne that he was in New York to "work and slave on my 'Whale' while it is driving through the press".Cited in Tanselle (1988), 663. He was staying with Allan and Sophia in a small room to correct proofs, and to (re)write the closing pages. 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 July 20: "I am now passing thro' the press, the closing sheets of my new work". 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".

On July 3, 1851, Bentley offered Melville £150 and "half profits", that is, half the profits that remained after the expenses of production and advertising. On July 20, Melville accepted, after which Bentley drew up a contract on August 13. 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 September 10. For over a month, these proofs had been in Melville's possession, and because the book would be set anew in London he could devote all his time to correcting and revising them. He still had no American publisher, so the usual hurry about getting the British publication to precede the American was not present.Tanselle (1988), 667 Only on September 12 was the Harper publishing contract signed. 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."

On October 18, the British 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. On November 14, 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 November 19, 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.

Melville's revisions and British editorial revisions

The British 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.

Excluding the preliminaries and the one extract, the three volumes of the British edition came to 927 pages and the single American volume to 635 pages.Tanselle (1988), 687 Accordingly, the dedication to Hawthorne in the American edition—"this book is inscribed to"—became "these volumes are inscribed to" in the British. The table of contents in the British 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'.

For unknown reasons, the "Etymology" and "Extracts" were moved to the end of the third volume.Tanselle (1988), 678 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 British volumes. Melville's involvement with this rearrangement is not clear: if it was Bentley's gesture toward accommodating Melville, as Tanselle suggests,