Moby-Dick

• 1. Introduction

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  Moby-Dick; or, The Whale begins with three words that have never lost their power: "Call me Ishmael." Herman Melville wrote those words as the opening of an 1851 novel about a sailor, a ship, and a white whale - and in doing so produced one of the most celebrated and unusual books in American literature. At the time of publication, almost nobody recognized what they were reading. The book sold poorly. It went out of print. Melville died in 1891 without seeing his masterpiece properly celebrated. Only decades later, after the centennial of his birth in 1919, did the world catch up to what D. H. Lawrence had already called "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" - and "the greatest book of the sea ever written." William Faulkner said he wished he had written it himself. So what is this book, really? It is the story of Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for a white sperm whale that bit off his leg. But it is also a meditation on perception, race, madness, and whether meaning can ever be found at all. The questions at its heart are ones that pull the reader forward through hundreds of pages of whaling science, Shakespearean soliloquy, and nautical disaster. How does a simple voyage story become an epic? What real events and books shaped its creation? And why did a commercial failure become, in time, a Great American Novel?

• 2. The Real Catastrophes Behind the Story

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  Two actual disasters gave Melville the bones of his plot. In 1820, a sperm whale rammed the Nantucket ship Essex some 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. The first mate, Owen Chase, was one of eight survivors. He recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Melville encountered this book in an unlikely way: during a mid-ocean meeting of ships in 1841 or 1842, he met Chase's son William, who lent him his father's copy. Melville later described reading it on the open sea, close to the actual latitude of the wreck, as having "a surprising effect" on him. The book was rare and out of print. Melville's father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, eventually tracked down an imperfect but clean copy through a friend in Nantucket, and gave it to Melville in April 1851. Melville made copious notes in it and kept it in his library for the rest of his life. The second source was the real white whale. In the late 1830s, an albino sperm whale known as Mocha Dick was said to have been killed in waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick was rumored to have some 20 harpoons in his back from previous encounters and to attack ships with what seemed like deliberate ferocity. Explorer J. N. Reynolds wrote about one of his battles with a whaler in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine. Reynolds described the whale as an old bull, "white as wool", who had survived a hundred fights. The captain in Reynolds's account rallies his crew much like Ahab does: when the men cower at the sight of the creature, the captain refuses to turn back. Melville was familiar with this article. Mocha Dick was not the only whale to sink ships. While the Essex went down in 1820, it was not until August 1851 - as Melville was completing his novel - that the whaler Ann Alexander, hunting in the Pacific near the Galapagos Islands, became the second vessel since the Essex to be attacked and sunk by a whale. Melville's reaction was striking: "Ye Gods! What a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short and pithy and very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."

• 3. The Friendship That Changed the Book

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  Nathaniel Hawthorne moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850. On the 5th of August that year, he met Melville for the first time at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend, which also included Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and James T. Fields. Melville was already deep into writing what would become Moby-Dick. Hawthorne's effect was immediate and lasting. In August 1850, with his manuscript perhaps half finished, Melville read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse and was so impressed that he compared it to Shakespeare in its cosmic ambitions. He wrote an unsigned review of the collection, titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in The Literary World on the 17th and the 24th of August. In the essay, Melville compared Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante. Scholar Bezanson describes the essay as so deeply connected to Melville's thinking while writing Moby-Dick that it should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading". The novel itself is dedicated to Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius". That winter, during the most intense period of work on the book, Melville sent Hawthorne a series of excited letters. In one from June 1851, he wrote: "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." Scholars disagree on exactly how much Hawthorne transformed the book. Some argue that reading Hawthorne and Shakespeare together inspired Melville to transform a relatively straightforward whaling adventure into something of epic, cosmic scale. Others, including scholar John Bryant, find "little concrete evidence, and nothing at all conclusive" that Melville radically altered the structure or conception. What is beyond dispute is that Melville's letters from this period show a writer who was rewriting his own sense of what a book could be.

• 4. The Books Within the Book

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  Melville drew on five whaling books for the dense factual fabric of Moby-Dick, and the most important was by English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale: Natural History of the Sperm Whale, published in 1839. Melville bought it on the 10th of July, 1850. Scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes that in "scale and complexity," this source surpasses all others in its significance to the novel's composition. According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, Beale's book supplied the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings - and Melville followed it closely while transforming its prosaic phrases into figures of speech. The second most important whaling source was Frederick Debell Bennett's A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from the Year 1833 to 1836, published in 1840. The third was J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, which Melville had reviewed for the Literary World in 1847. The fourth was Reverend Henry T. Cheever's The Whale and His Captors, published in 1850 - which arrived too late in the writing process to be of much more use than two episodes. The fifth was William Scoresby Jr.'s An Account of the Arctic Regions, published in 1820, though its subject was the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. Melville satirized Scoresby repeatedly, disguising him under pseudonyms and giving his accounts "a humorous twist of fact." Beyond whaling books, Melville consulted Sir Thomas Browne's essay "Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale", and the influence of Renaissance humanists including Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Rabelais runs throughout the prose. Browne's Religio Medici in particular drew Melville's admiration; he described Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel'." Scholars have also noted debts to Thomas Carlyle, particularly his Sartor Resartus. Alexander Welsh argues that Carlyle figured "largely in the undertaking" of the novel, and Jonathan Arac writes that Ahab is "very much a Carlylean hero".

• 5. Shakespeare in the Rigging

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  F. O. Matthiessen, writing in 1941, declared that Melville's possession by Shakespeare went further than all other influences, because it led Melville to discover his own full strength "through the challenge of the most abundant imagination in history." Melville's reading copies of Shakespeare show that he immersed himself deeply in King Lear and Macbeth while preparing to write. Matthiessen describes this reading as "a catalytic agent" that transformed Melville's writing from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces. The creation of Captain Ahab, biographer Leon Howard found, followed a specific 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 echoes in phrases about Ahab. Ahab seemed to have "what seems a half-wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature." Matthiessen points out that Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the chapter called "The Quarter-Deck," is virtually blank verse that can be printed as such. A sentence from the cetological chapter echoes the famous speech from Macbeth: where Shakespeare wrote of a tale "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing," Melville wrote of "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing." The assimilation was so complete, Matthiessen concludes, that it gave the prose "a kind of diction that depended upon no source" - one that could, as D. H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life." The parallels between Ahab and Shakespeare's tragic heroes extend to the novel's structure. In Howard's view, Melville "consciously thought of his protagonist as a tragic hero of the sort found in Hamlet and King Lear." Ahab's first appearance on the quarterdeck, his announcement that he seeks vengeance on the whale that took his leg, and his nailing of a doubloon to the mast for the first sailor to sight Moby Dick all carry the weight of Shakespearean theatrical staging.

• 6. Race, Class, and Pip's Silence

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  The crew of the Pequod is described as culturally diverse in a way unusual for American fiction of the mid-19th century. Chief mate Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker, is 30 years old. Second mate Stubb comes from Cape Cod. His harpooneer Tashtego is a pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head. The third mate Flask comes from Martha's Vineyard, and his harpooneer Daggoo is described as a tall African. Queequeg, the first person Ishmael befriends, is a tattooed Polynesian harpooneer whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko. Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco notes that the novel represents all races among the crew as part of its search for truth beneath surface differences. Although Ishmael is initially afraid of Queequeg, he quickly concludes he would "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." Race is carried most pointedly, however, by Pip. Pip is a small African American cabin boy who suffers a mental collapse after twice jumping from Stubb's whaleboat in panic. After being left alone at sea the second time, he goes insane by the time the crew finds him. Editors Bryant and Springer observe that when Ahab, genuinely moved by Pip's suffering, questions him gently, Pip can only repeat the language of a fugitive slave advertisement: "Pip! Reward for Pip!" The source of this language reveals the horror beneath the surface. A chapter called "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish" makes this structural violence explicit. Ishmael explains the legal concept: those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship have the right of ownership. He then compares this directly to slavery, serfdom, and military conquest. Fifty chapters after Pip's breakdown, the novel notes that his suffering deepened when he was reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and brutalized, in the words of one reading, "Pip becomes the ship's conscience."

• 7. A Language of Its Own

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  Critic Newton Arvin recognized that Melville coined words throughout Moby-Dick as if English vocabulary were too limited for what he needed to express. The most striking examples are verbal nouns, mostly plural: allurings, coincidings, leewardings. Equally abundant are unfamiliar adjectives and adverbs - participial adjectives like officered, omnitooled, and uncatastrophied; participial adverbs like intermixingly, postponedly, and uninterpenetratingly; rarities like unsmoothable, spermy, and leviathanic; and adjectival compounds including "the message-carrying air" and "the circus-running sun." Melville also converts nouns into verbs: "who didst thunder him higher than a throne," and "my fingers... began... to serpentine and spiralize." Arvin writes that the essence of Melville's style lies in the way parts of speech are blended until the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, "becomes a half unreal one." This language reflects an underlying awareness, Arvin argues: that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are surface aspects of one underlying reality. Scholars Bryant and Springer describe the book as above all a work of language - "nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic and unceasingly allusive." Matthiessen identifies four distinct levels of rhetoric at work: a relatively straightforward expository style in the cetological chapters; a poetic level such as Ahab's quarterdeck monologue; an idiomatic level evident in the dialogue of Stubb; and a composite level that blends all three. A chapter called "Nantucket" illustrates this fourth level, which Bezanson calls a comical "prose poem" blending "high and low with a relaxed assurance." The Homeric simile reaches its fullest expression during the final chase, where a ship tearing through the ocean is compared to "a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field."

• 8. Failure, Then Resurrection

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  The novel was published in two editions within weeks of each other in late 1851. It appeared first in London in October, in three volumes, under the title The Whale, published by Richard Bentley. The New York edition, in a single volume under the definitive title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, followed in November. Bentley censored or changed sensitive passages in the London edition. Melville also made revisions, including a last-minute change of the title for the New York printing. One persistent quirk survived both editions: the whale appears in the text of both as "Moby Dick," without the hyphen. British reviewers were largely favorable, though some objected to a structural problem: in the London edition, the narrator who tells the story appears to have perished with the ship, since Bentley's version lacked the epilogue that explains Ishmael's survival. American reviewers were more hostile. The book was a commercial failure and went out of print. Melville died in 1891 with the novel uncelebrated. Its resurrection came only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of his birth drew fresh attention to his work. The reputation that Moby-Dick now carries - as one of the definitive American novels - was built entirely after the author could see it. The final payment Bentley offered Melville for the British rights was 150 pounds plus half profits, agreed in a contract signed on the 13th of August, 1851. The book Melville sent to London for 150 pounds is now recognized as the one his friend Hawthorne received in dedication - the one William Faulkner said he wished he had written himself.