Moby-Dick hides an encyclopedia of whales inside a revenge story
Herman Melville's 1851 novel is famous for Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale that took his leg. Less famous is how much of it is not narrative at all: sermons, stage directions, soliloquies and whole chapters classifying whales, arranged by Melville with surprising structural care.
Melville started writing in February 1850 and finished eighteen months later, a year behind his own schedule. He drew on his years as an ordinary seaman between 1841 and 1844, some of them aboard whalers, and on extensive reading about whaling. The white whale was modelled on Mocha Dick, an albino whale notorious for evading capture. Midway through the manuscript, in August 1850, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and was deeply affected by the encounter.
The book first came out in London in October 1851 as The Whale, in three volumes, with sensitive passages altered by the publisher Richard Bentley. A month later New York got a single volume under the final title. The story opens with Ishmael heading to New Bedford one December, sharing an inn bed with the tattooed harpooneer Queequeg, hearing Father Mapple preach on Jonah and signing onto the Pequod at Nantucket. Ahab finally appears on deck standing on a prosthetic leg carved from a whale's jawbone.
Scholars have mapped the apparent sprawl. Lawrence Buell sees three patterns: nine meetings with ships that have met Moby Dick, each more badly damaged than the last; whale encounters that grow steadily more dramatic; and lavish cetology moving from whaling's ancient history toward the particular whale. Walter Bezanson notes that from about two-fifths of the way in, individual whale kills act as structural occasions that trigger clusters of whaling lore.
The ending comes in a three-day chase. On the first day the whale bites Ahab's boat in half; on the second it wrecks three boats and kills Fedallah, leader of Ahab's secret crew. Along the way Melville borrowed voices from Shakespeare, Carlyle, Sir Thomas Browne and the Bible, making the novel a landmark of the American Renaissance.
Source: Moby-Dick
