Moby-Dick

• 1. Origins And Inspiration

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  Herman Melville signed on as a green hand for the maiden voyage of the whaler Acushnet on the 30th of December 1840. This five-year journey provided the raw material for his epic novel. The ship's owner was a Quaker named Melvin O. Bradford who erased the word swear from documents and replaced it with affirm. Five foreigners sailed aboard the vessel, four of them Portuguese. Three black men were also in the crew including two seamen and a cook. Melville later wrote that he spent eighteen months as an ordinary seaman between 1841 and 1842. He drew heavily on this experience when crafting the world of Moby-Dick.

  Two actual historical events served as the genesis for the story. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820 after a sperm whale rammed her two thousand miles from South America. First mate Owen Chase recorded these events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Melville read this book avidly and made copious notes in it before keeping it in his library for life. Another event involved the alleged killing of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick off the Chilean island of Mocha in the late 1830s. This creature had over one hundred encounters with whalers between 1810 and the 1830s. It appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity and bore more than ten harpoons in its back.

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• 2. Composition Process

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  Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850 and finished eighteen months later. The most intense work occurred during the winter of 1850, 1851 at Arrowhead, his house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He met Nathaniel Hawthorne on the 5th of August 1850, at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Hawthorne's family lived in a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts since March 1850. Melville wrote an unsigned review titled Hawthrone and His Mosses which appeared in The Literary World on August 17 and 24.

  This encounter deeply impressed him and may have inspired him to revise the book from a straightforward adventure into an epic tragedy. He dedicated the novel to Hawthorne as token of admiration for his genius. Letters from June 1851 reveal how Melville experienced his development from age twenty-five. He stated that three weeks had scarcely passed without unfolding within himself. By the 20th of July 1851, he announced passing through the press the closing sheets of his new work. The final stages of composition overlapped with early publication stages while he corrected proofs in New York.

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• 3. Publication History

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  The book was first published in London in October 1851 under the title The Whale in three volumes. Richard Bentley served as the publisher who censored or changed sensitive passages. A single-volume edition bearing the definitive title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale appeared in New York in November 1851. Melville made revisions including a last-minute change of the title for the American edition. The whale appears in both editions as Moby Dick without a hyphen. Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable though some objected to the narrator perishing with the ship since the British edition lacked the epilogue recounting Ishmael's survival.

  American reviewers proved more hostile and the book became a commercial failure. It remained out of print at the time of Melville's death in 1891. His reputation as a Great American Novel emerged only in the twentieth century after the 1919 centennial of his birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself. D.H. Lawrence called it one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world. The opening sentence Call me Ishmael stands among world literature's most famous lines.

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• 4. Narrative Structure

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  Ishmael narrates his December travels from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts where plans exist 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 Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian cannibal whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko. They attend Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah before heading for Nantucket. Ishmael signs up with Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod. Ahab appears on the quarterdeck announcing revenge against the white whale that took his leg.

  The novel divides into chapter sequences, clusters, and balancing chapters according to critic Walter Bezanson. Nine meetings between the Pequod and other ships form a structural device resembling bones to the book's flesh. These encounters grow increasingly severe foreshadowing the Pequod's own fate. The narrative architecture centers on two consciousnesses: Ahab as force of linearity and Ishmael as force of digression. Ahab seeks to hunt Moby Dick while Ishmael desires to understand what to make of both whale and hunt. Their intertwined relationship creates an idiosyncratic variant of bipolar observer-hero narrative.

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• 5. Thematic Depth

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  Ahab explains that all visible objects are but pasteboard masks and he is determined to strike through them. He declares the white whale represents that wall which the prisoner must thrust through to reach outside. Each crewmember perceives the coin hammered to the main mast in ways shaped by personality. Starbuck sees the Trinity while Flask finds no meaning. Pip suffers mental disintegration after being reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and brutalized, Pip becomes the ship's conscience.

  Race carries the theme primarily through Pip, the diminutive Black cabin boy. When Pip has almost drowned, Ahab questions him gently yet Pip can only parrot language from an advertisement for return of fugitive slave saying Reward for Pip. The novel also reads as critical of Transcendentalism attacking Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance. Death spiritual emotional physical is price of self-reliance when pushed to solipsism where world exists apart from all-sufficient self. Melville points up dangers of exaggerated self-regard rather suggesting vital possibilities of self like Emerson loved to do.

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• 6. Stylistic Innovation

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  Moby-Dick stretches grammar quoting well-known or obscure sources swinging from calm prose to high rhetoric. Melville coined words as if English vocabulary were too limited for complex things he had to express. Verbal nouns mostly plural include allurings coinciding and leewardings. Unfamiliar adjectives and adverbs abound including officered omnitooled and uncatastrophied. Participial adverbs such as intermixingly postponedly and uninterpenetratingly appear frequently. Adjectival compounds range from odd to magnificent like message-carrying air circus-running sun teeth-tiered sharks.

  His three most important literary sources are Bible Shakespeare and Milton. F.O. Matthiessen declared in 1941 that Melville possession by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences. Reading Shakespeare was catalytic agent transforming writing from limited reporting to expression of profound natural forces. Ahab's first extended speech to crew in Quarter Deck chapter is virtually blank verse printable as such. The prose depends upon no source but sense of speech rhythm conveying something almost superhuman or inhuman bigger than life. Melville mastered how to make language itself dramatic relying on verbs of action lending dynamic pressure to movement and meaning.

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