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=                             Moby-Dick                              =
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                            Introduction
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'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale' is an 1851 epic novel by American writer
Herman Melville. The book is centered 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, 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
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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 cannibal Polynesian 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 then 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 northeast towards the equatorial Pacific
Ocean to sail 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 '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 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 '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
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 mortally stricken 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.


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". 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".


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.

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".

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 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".

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
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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 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.

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 "[points] up the dangers of an exaggerated self-regard,
rather than, as ... Emerson loved to do, [suggested] the vital
possibilities of the self". Newton Arvin further suggests that
self-reliance was, for Melville, really the "[masquerade in kingly
weeds of] a 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. 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" 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". 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 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:

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). 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". 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 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
================
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 '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 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'".


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
=================
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:



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 which are 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. 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 [this source] to 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. 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'. 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 [Sperm-Whale's] eyes
but small, the pizell [penis] large, 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".

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'. 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.

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 said that, in these earlier books,
American proof sheets had been sent to the British publisher and that
publication in the United States did not commence 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". 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. 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. 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. 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, its selection put an emphasis on the quotation Melville
might not have agreed with.

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


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

# Sacrilegious passages, more than 1,200 words: Attributing human
failures to God was grounds for excision or revision, as was comparing
human shortcomings to divine ones. For example, in chapter 28, "Ahab",
Ahab stands with "a crucifixion in his face" was revised to "an
apparently eternal anguish";
# Sexual matters, including the sex life of whales and even Ishmael's
worried anticipation of the nature of Queequeg's underwear, as well as
allusions to fornication or harlots, and "our hearts' honeymoon" (in
relation to Ishmael and Queequeg). Chapter 95, however, "The Cassock",
referring to the whale's genital organ, was untouched, perhaps because
of Melville's indirect language.
# Remarks "belittling royalty or implying a criticism of the British":
This meant the exclusion of the complete chapter 25, a "Postscript" on
the use of sperm oil at coronations;
# Perceived grammatical or stylistic anomalies were treated with "a
highly conservative interpretation of rules of 'correctness.

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

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


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

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


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

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

Melville's earnings from the book add up to $1,260: the £150 advance
from Bentley was equivalent to $703, and the American printings earned
him $556, which was $100 less than he earned from any of his five
previous books. Melville's widow received another $81 when the United
States Book Company issued the book and sold almost 1,800 copies
between 1892 and 1898.


                             Reception
======================================================================
The reception of 'The Whale' in Britain and of 'Moby-Dick' in the
United States differed in two ways, according to Parker. First,
British literary criticism was more sophisticated and developed than
in the still-young republic, with British reviewing done by "cadres of
brilliant literary people" who were "experienced critics and trenchant
prose stylists", while the United States had only "a handful of
reviewers" capable enough to be called critics, and American editors
and reviewers habitually echoed British opinion. American reviewing
was mostly delegated to "newspaper staffers" or else by "amateur
contributors more noted for religious piety than critical acumen."
Second, the differences between the two editions caused "two distinct
critical receptions."


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

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

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



According to the London 'Literary Gazette and Journal of Science and
Art' for December 6, 1851, "Mr. Melville cannot do without savages, so
he makes half of his 'dramatis personae' wild Indians, Malays, and
other untamed humanities", who appeared in "an odd book, professing to
be a novel; wantonly eccentric, outrageously bombastic; in places
charmingly and vividly descriptive". Most critics regretted the
extravagant digressions because they distracted from an otherwise
interesting and even exciting narrative, but even critics who did not
like the book as a whole praised Melville's originality of imagination
and expression.

Because the English edition omitted the epilogue describing Ishmael's
escape, British reviewers read a book with a first-person narrator who
apparently did not survive. The reviewer of the 'Literary Gazette'
asked how Ishmael, "who appears to have been drowned with the rest,
communicated his notes to Mr. Bentley". The reviewer in the
'Spectator' objected that "nothing should be introduced into a novel
which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus,
he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they 'all'
perish." The 'Dublin University Magazine' asked "how does it happen
that the author is alive to tell the story?" A few other reviewers,
who did not comment upon the apparent impossibility of Ishmael telling
the story, pointed out violations of narrative conventions in other
passages.

Other reviewers accepted the flaws they perceived. 'John Bull' praised
the author for making literature out of unlikely and even unattractive
matter, and the 'Morning Post' found that delight far outstripped the
improbable character of events. Though some reviewers viewed the
characters, especially Ahab, as exaggerated, others felt that it took
an extraordinary character to undertake the battle with the white
whale. Melville's style was often praised, although some found it
excessive or too American.


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

The New York 'North American Miscellany' for December summarized the
verdict in the 'Athenaeum'. The reviewer of the December New York
'Eclectic Magazine' had actually read 'Moby-Dick' in full, and was
puzzled why the 'Athenaeum' was so scornful of the ending. The attack
on 'The Whale' by the 'Spectator' was reprinted in the December New
York 'International Magazine', which inaugurated the influence of
another unfavorable review. Rounding off what American readers were
told about the British reception, in January 'Harper's Monthly
Magazine' attempted some damage control, and wrote that the book had
"excited a general interest" among the London magazines.

The most influential American review, ranked according to the number
of references to it, appeared in the weekly magazine 'Literary World',
which had printed Melville's "Mosses" essay the preceding year. The
author of the unsigned review in two installments, on November 15 and
22, was later identified as publisher Evert Duyckinck. The first half
of the first installment was devoted to an event of remarkable
coincidence: early in the month, between the publishing of the British
and the American edition, a whale had sunk the New Bedford whaler 'Ann
Alexander' near Chile.

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

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

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

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

Reviewers who actually did read the book "found much to praise,"
Robertson-Lorant writes, but conservative reviewers did not like it. A
friend of Duyckinck's, William Allen Butler, protested in the
'National Intelligencer' against "the querulous and cavilling
innuendoes" and the "irreverent wit," while the 'Boston Post' called
it "a crazy sort of affair."


                       Legacy and adaptations
======================================================================
Within a year after Melville's death in 1891, 'Moby-Dick', along with
'Typee', 'Omoo', and 'Mardi', was reprinted by Harper & Brothers,
giving it a chance to be rediscovered. However, only New York's
literary underground showed interest, just enough to keep Melville's
name circulating for the next 25 years in the capital of American
publishing. During this time, a few critics were willing to devote
time, space, and a modicum of praise to Melville and his works, or at
least those that could still be easily obtained or remembered. Other
works, especially the poetry, went largely forgotten.

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

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

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

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

Both Mystic Seaport and the New Bedford Whaling Museum hold annual
marathon live readings of Melville's novel in which volunteers read
chapters aloud. The Mystic Seaport Marathon Reading is usually held
July 31st to August 1st aboard the whaling vessel 'Charles W. Morgan'
with an actor portraying Herman Melville reading the first and final
chapters, culminating in a celebration of Melville's birthday. The
2025 New Bedford Whaling Museum Marathon was held January 3-5, 2025.

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

In 1961, a Japanese author, Kōichirō Uno, won the Akutagawa Prize with
his novel 'The Whale God', which was later made into a tokusatsu film
by Daiei Film next year. Uno's 'The Whale God' was presumably inspired
by 'Moby-Dick' as the former also focuses on vengeful whalers who seek
after an unusually large and powerful whale.


According to critic Camille Paglia in 'Sexual Personae', a book with
the whiteness or blankness of nonmeaning as its main symbol should
logically propose a depersonalized view of nature, but in this respect
the novel is "amazingly inconsistent", as Melville "elevates the
masculine principle above the feminine." To be perfectly consistent,
in her view the whale should be "sexually neuter," and its whiteness
"an obliteration of person, gender, and meaning."

British explorer Tim Severin wrote in his 1999 book 'In Search of Moby
Dick: Quest for the White Whale' about traveling throughout the
Pacific, inquiring among indigenous fishermen and watermen about white
whales, in personal experience or local folklore.

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


                              Editions
======================================================================
* Melville, H., 'The Whale'. London: Richard Bentley, 1851. 3 vols.
(viii, 312; iv, 303; iv, 328 pp.). Published October 18, 1851.
* Melville, H.,
'[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=dul1.ark:/13960/t3kw6ns1s;view=1up;seq=9
Moby-Dick'; or, 'The Whale]'. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851.
xxiii, 635 pages. Published probably on November 14, 1851.
* Melville, H.,
[http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015046801760;view=1up;seq=20
'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'.] Edited by Luther S. Mansfield and Howard
P. Vincent. New York: Hendricks House, 1952. Includes a 25-page
Introduction and over 250 pages of Explanatory Notes with an Index.
* Melville, H., 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale': An Authoritative Text,
Reviews and Letters by Melville, Analogues and Sources, Criticism. A
Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel
Parker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967. .
* Melville, H. '[https://books.google.com/books?id=mccZA9jAhfgC
Moby-Dick, or The Whale].' Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the
Writings of Herman Melville 6. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern U. Press,
1988. A critical text with appendices on the history and reception of
the book. The text is in the public domain.
* 'Moby-Dick'. A Norton Critical Edition. Parker, Hershel, and
Harrison Hayford (eds.). Second Edition, New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company. .
* 'Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition', Edited by John Bryant and
Haskell Springer. New York: Longman, 2007 and 2009. .
* 'Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism', Hershel
Parker, ed. (W. W. Norton and Company, 2018). .


                         General references
======================================================================
* Abrams, M. H. (1999).
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160527182311/http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/ref/abrams_mh.pdf
'A Glossary of Literary Terms'.] Seventh Edition. Fort Worth, Texas:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
* Arvin, Newton (1950). "The Whale." Excerpt from Newton Arvin,
'Herman Melville' (New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1950),
in Parker and Hayford (1970).
* Bercaw, Mary K. (1987). 'Melville's Sources'. Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press.
* Berthoff, Warner (1962). 'The Example of Melville'. Reprinted 1972,
New York: W. W. Norton.
* Bezanson, Walter E. (1953). "'Moby-Dick': Work of Art". Reprinted in
Parker and Hayford (2001).
* --- . (1986). "'Moby-Dick': Document, Drama, Dream." In Bryant 1986.
* Branch, Watson G. (1974). 'Melville: The Critical Heritage.' First
edition 1974. Paperback edition 1985, London and Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
* Bryant, John, ed. (1986). 'A Companion to Melville Studies'.
Greenport, CT: Greenwood Press.
* --- (1998). "'Moby-Dick' as Revolution". In Levine 1998.
* --- (2006). "The Melville Text". In Kelley 2006.
* --- , and Haskell Springer (2007). "Introduction", "Explanatory
Notes" and "The Making of 'Moby-Dick'". In John Bryant and Haskell
Springer (eds), Herman Melville, 'Moby-Dick'. New York Boston: Pearson
Longman (A Longman Critical Edition). .
*
*  Chapter by chapter explication of the text and references.
*
* Faulkner, William (1927). "I Wish I Had Written That". Originally in
the 'Chicago Tribune', July 16, 1927. Reprinted in Parker and Hayford
(2001), 640.
* Forster, E.M. (1927).
'[https://books.google.com/books?id=WOdVCgAAQBAJ Aspects of the
Novel]'. Reprinted Middlesex: Penguin Books 1972.
*
* Grey, Robin (2006). "The Legacy of Britain". In Kelley (2006).
* Hayford, Harrison (1988). "Historical Note Section V". In Melville
(1988).
* Heflin, Wilson (2004).
[https://books.google.com/books?id=EvT98u-eJ24C&q=melville 'Herman
Melville's Whaling Years'.] Edited by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and
Thomas Farel Heffernan. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
*  At InternetArchive
[https://archive.org/details/criticalessayson0000unse_o2j8/page/n8/mode/1up
Online]
*  Reprinted in
* Kelley, Wyn, ed. (2006).
'[https://books.google.com/books?id=juEDCgAAQBAJ A Companion to Herman
Melville]'. Malden, MA, Oxford, UK, and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
* King, Richard J. (2019). 'Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of
Moby-Dick'. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Lawrence, D. H. (1923).
'[https://books.google.com/books?id=IHSM6SIGi1AC Studies in Classic
American Literature]'. Reprinted London: Penguin Books.
*
* Levine, Robert S. (1998).
[https://books.google.com/books?id=L-KhKv9kNqkC 'The Cambridge
Companion to Herman Melville']. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* .
*
* Melville, Herman (1993).
'[https://books.google.com/books?id=nBeBBc3m4yYC Correspondence]'. The
Writings of Herman Melville, Vol. 14, edited by Lynn Horth. Evanston
and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library.
* Milder, Robert (1977). The Composition of 'Moby-Dick': A Review and
a Prospect." 'ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance'.
* Milder, Robert (1988). "Herman Melville." In Emory Elliott (General
Editor), '[https://books.google.com/books?id=6Si-sO_khgsC Columbia
Literary History of the United States]'. New York: Columbia University
Press.
* Miller, Edwin Haviland (1991). 'Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life
of Nathaniel Hawthorne'. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
* Olson, Charles (2015) [1947]. 'Call Me Ishmael', Eastford,
Connecticut: Martino Publishing. .
* Olsen-Smith, Steven (2008). [Review of Bryant and Springer 2007].
'Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies', June 2008, 96-9.
* Paglia, Camille (2001). "'Moby-Dick' as Sexual Protest". In Parker
and Hayford, eds., 2001.
* Parker, Hershel (1988). "Historical Note Section VII". In Melville
(1988).
* Parker, Hershel, and Harrison Hayford, eds. (1970). 'Moby-Dick as
Doubloon. Essays and Extracts (1851-1970).' New York: W.W. Norton
& Company Inc., 1970.
* Parker, Hershel, and Harrison Hayford, eds. (2001). Herman Melville,
'Moby-Dick'. A Norton Critical Edition. Second Edition, New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company.
* Parker, Hershel (2002).
'[https://books.google.com/books?id=5bI50n5WImkC Herman Melville: A
Biography. Volume 2, 1851-1891.]' Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
*
* Rampersad, Arnold (1997).
[https://books.google.com/books?id=3ROt_zMv1WsC&dq=melville&pg=PA181
"Shadow and Veil: Melville and Modern Black Consciousness."]
'Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays'. Edited by John Bryant
and Robert Milder. Kent, Ohia, and London, England: The Kent State
University Press.
* Rampersad, Arnold (2007). 'Ralph Ellison: A Biography.' New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
* Robertson-Lorant, Laurie (1996). 'Melville: A Biography.' New York:
Clarkson Potters/ Publishers.
* Tanselle, G. Thomas (1988). "Historical Note Section VI", "Note on
the Text", and "The Hubbard Copy of 'The Whale'". In Melville (1988).
* Vincent, Howard P. (1949). 'The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick'. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
* Wright, Nathalia (1940).
[https://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2920476?uid=3738736&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104087484591
"Biblical Allusion in Melville's Prose."] 'American Literature', May
1940, 185-199.
* Wright, Nathalia. (1949). 'Melville's Use of the Bible'. Durham,
North Carolina: Duke University Press.InternetArchive free
[https://archive.org/details/melvillesuseofbi0000wrig_y3c2/page/n9/mode/2up
Online].


                           External links
======================================================================
; Digital editions
*
*
*
* [http://www.mobydickbigread.com The 'Moby-Dick' "Big Read"], "an
online version of Melville's magisterial tome: each of its 135
chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the
unknown"
* [https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/moby-dick-side-by-side
Side-by-side versions of the British and American 1851 first editions
of 'Moby-Dick'] at the Melville Electronic Library, with differences
highlighted

; Associated texts
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171215103949/http://organizations.plattsburgh.edu/museum/mdimg1.htm
'Moby Dick or The Whale' illustrations] by Rockwell Kent for the 1930
Lakeside Press edition
*[https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.SCOTCHH
Guide to the Hank Scotch Moby Dick Comic Books Collection 2008] at the
[https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/scrc/ University of Chicago Special
Collections Research Center]
* [http://melvill1.w11.wh-2.com/pages/policies Melville's Marginalia
Online] A virtual archive of books Melville owned or borrowed and a
digital edition of books he marked and annotated.

; Educational resources
*
"[https://edsitement.neh.gov/curricula/melvilles-moby-dick-shifts-narrative-voice-and-literary-genres
Melville's 'Moby-Dick': Shifts in Narrative Voice and Literary
Genres]" lesson plan for grades 9-12.
* [http://www.powermobydick.com Power Moby Dick]
* [http://www.readmoby.com How to read Melville's 'Moby Dick'] (guide
for first time readers)

; Other
* [http://www.wnyc.org/story/95322-american-icons-moby-dick/ American
Icons: 'Moby-Dick'], a Peabody Award-winning episode of 'Studio 360'
that examines the influence of 'Moby-Dick' on contemporary American
culture


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