In brief
A man with nowhere to be signs on a whaling ship. Its captain, who lost a leg to a white whale, has no interest in oil and means to spend the voyage, the ship and everyone aboard on killing that animal. He succeeds in spending them. It would make a good short story, and Melville takes 135 chapters over it, because the story is only half of what is going on. The other half is a comic, encyclopaedic, sometimes sublime account of what a whale is, what whaling is and whether anything out there can be known at all.
People give up on it for that reason. But the chapters on rope and blubber are not padding around the plot; they are the argument against it.
The argument
The book has two minds and they read the world in opposite ways. Ahab reads it as a code with one key. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks”, he tells Starbuck, and behind them something is reasoning and means him harm. “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall” (ch. 36). When Starbuck objects, “Vengeance on a dumb brute”, he is quite right, and it makes no difference. As the narrator says, “All evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick” (ch. 41). Hatred, for him, is a theory of knowledge.
Ishmael is the other reader. He spends hundreds of pages measuring, classifying and dissecting the same animal and ends where he began. “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will” (ch. 86). The famous chapter on whiteness (ch. 42) is what the terror really is for him: not malice, but the possibility of nothing, “a dumb blankness, full of meaning”. Ahab cannot bear that possibility and Ishmael can, sometimes with terror and often with jokes. When the doubloon nailed to the mast is read in turn by each man on board, each finds his own face in it, and mad little Pip conjugates the verdict: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” (ch. 99).
So the plot rules on the argument. Starbuck’s last appeal states it exactly: “Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” (ch. 135). The whale sinks the ship. And the man who survives does so on the coffin made for Queequeg, whom he met by being made to share a bed. It is the book’s best joke and deepest idea that the one thing left floating is what friendship made.
The shape of the book
The proportions are themselves a statement. Before the novel starts there are a mock-learned Etymology and some three thousand words of Extracts, every mention of whales a “Sub-Sub” librarian could find. Ahab, whom we have heard about for chapters, does not appear until ch. 28, about a fifth of the way in. The White Whale is not sighted until ch. 133, about ninety-four per cent of the way through, and is gone by the end of ch. 135. The rest is delay, and delay is the book’s method: it makes you live in the work and the waiting the way the crew does, while an obsession stands on the deck overhead.
What organises the long middle is a set of nine meetings with other ships, from the Goney (ch. 52) to the Delight (ch. 131). Each brings Ahab a piece of news or a warning, and each is a different answer to the white whale. The captain of the Samuel Enderby has also lost a limb to him and cheerfully wants nothing more to do with him (ch. 100). The Rachel begs for help finding a lost son, and Ahab refuses (ch. 128). In ch. 132, the most beautiful chapter of the book, he nearly turns back, moved by a calm day and by Starbuck’s face. Then he asks, “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” and goes on.
The form keeps changing under you. It is a first-person memoir at the start; then it has a sermon (ch. 9); then five chapters from ch. 36 run as stage drama, with directions and soliloquies; then a taxonomy which sorts whales as Folio, Octavo and Duodecimo like books in a library (ch. 32). Ishmael dissolves into a voice that can overhear Ahab alone in his cabin, and nobody explains how.
The voice
“Call me Ishmael” (ch. 1) is three words that stop short of saying it is his name. What follows is the most various prose in American writing, a mix of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and Sir Thomas Browne, sailors’ slang and Yankee stand-up. He ends the great taxonomy on “Mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing” (ch. 32), and there is Macbeth as a pun. Matthiessen showed long ago how thoroughly Shakespeare entered the book’s rhythm, and Ahab’s speeches are often near-blank verse.
It is the comedy that readers forget. Ishmael’s first night sharing a bed with a tattooed harpooneer ends in “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (ch. 3), and he wakes with Queequeg’s arm thrown over him (ch. 4). Hands squeezing lumps of sperm oil become a rapturous fantasy of universal brotherhood, “the very milk and sperm of kindness” (ch. 94), both the filthiest and the tenderest joke of its century. Melville knows exactly how grand he is being and laughs at it: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme” (ch. 104). And he knows it can’t be finished: “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (ch. 32).
The ship
The Pequod is a floating factory, and the novel is one of very few great ones that show you the job. You learn how a whale is killed (ch. 61), flensed (ch. 67) and boiled down in a furnace on a wooden deck (ch. 96), all for lamp oil and machine lubricant in a country that does not ask where its light comes from. Ishmael calls the whale-ship “my Yale College and my Harvard” (ch. 24) and he means it: labour is his education. Being tied to Queequeg on the monkey-rope, so that either’s slip kills both, teaches him that his “individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (ch. 72).
It is also a model of the country, and an uncomfortable one. The ship is named after a people the colonists all but exterminated, as Ishmael notes in passing (ch. 16). The crew are “Isolatoes”, “federated along one keel” (ch. 27), from every nation, with the white American officers commanded by one obsessive and the killing done by a Polynesian, a Native American and an African. Melville was writing in 1850–51, as the Fugitive Slave Law came in, and his father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, upheld its enforcement in the Sims case of 1851. “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that”, Ishmael asks in the first chapter (ch. 1), as a joke. Then the Black cabin boy Pip, told that a whale “would sell for thirty times what you would”, is left alone in the ocean and goes mad, because he “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (ch. 93). C. L. R. James read the whole book, from Ellis Island in the 1950s, as a prophecy of totalitarian management: a crew of competent workers led to death by one man’s idea.
The people
Ishmael
Schoolmaster, depressive, joker. He goes to sea to cure “a damp, drizzly November in my soul” (ch. 1). The book’s real love story is his friendship with Queequeg, and his whole philosophy is that you are not safe alone: “I’ll try a pagan friend” (ch. 10).
Ahab
“A grand, ungodly, god-like man” (ch. 16), with “a crucifixion in his face” (ch. 28), and he has his “humanities”: a young wife and child. He knows what he is, and that is the horror: Ishmael grants him a glimpse of it, “all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad” (ch. 41). Near the end he admits, “Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” (ch. 135). His force is real: in one speech he turns a commercial voyage into a private vendetta, and the crew cheers.
Queequeg
A South Sea prince who ships out to learn about Christians, concludes he prefers his own people and stays anyway. He rescues a man who has insulted him (ch. 13), nearly dies, orders a coffin and then recovers because he has remembered something he has to do (ch. 110). He is the moral centre of the book, and he says almost nothing.
Starbuck, Stubb and Flask
Three ways of failing to stop him. Starbuck, a brave Quaker, sees all of it, tells him to “beware of Ahab” (ch. 109), stands outside the cabin at night with a loaded musket and puts it back (ch. 123). Stubb will meet it all with a pipe: “I’ll go to it laughing” (ch. 39). Flask thinks of the whale as “a species of magnified mouse” (ch. 27).
Pip
The smallest person on the ship and the one Ahab finally loves. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul” (ch. 93). Ahab takes the mad boy into his cabin (ch. 125) and almost turns human; “man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”, the narrator says.
How it was made
Melville went to sea on the whaler Acushnet in January 1841, jumped ship in the Marquesas in 1842, and had a career writing up his South Seas adventures before he was thirty. He knew of the Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820, and had read Owen Chase’s account of it on the voyage; and Jeremiah Reynolds’s 1839 magazine piece on a white whale called Mocha Dick gave a white whale a name.
In May 1850 he told Richard Henry Dana that he was half way through a whaling book, warning that “blubber is blubber”. That summer he bought Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale, met Hawthorne at a picnic on 5 August and wrote his essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in a fever, then moved to a farm at Pittsfield with money from Shaw. The book took another year. Whether those months turned a whaling yarn into a tragedy with Ahab as its Lear, as Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and many others have argued, is contested; there is no manuscript, and the loose ends may be deliberate. When it was done he told Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
It came out in London first, as The Whale, on 18 October 1851, in three volumes and bowdlerised by the publisher. Somehow the Epilogue was left out, so British reviewers read a first-person novel whose narrator drowned, and said so. The New York edition, under the new title, followed on 14 November.
Readers and critics
Reviews were not as bad as legend says, but they were mixed, and British complaints about the ending crossed the Atlantic. The sales are the real story: 3,215 copies in Melville’s lifetime, and $556 for him from American printings. A fire at Harper’s in 1853 burned almost 300 unsold copies. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York and died in 1891, almost forgotten.
The revival began around the centenary of his birth, with Raymond Weaver’s biography in 1921 and Carl Van Doren’s advocacy, and D. H. Lawrence’s essay of 1923, written from the English edition without the Epilogue. Since then each generation has found its own: E. M. Forster’s remark that it is “full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem”; Matthiessen’s Shakespeare; James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953); and Toni Morrison’s lecture of 1988 reading whiteness as the book’s subject in the plainest racial sense, as an ideology Melville was hunting. Each era has tended to find Ahab in its most frightening public figure, which is itself the one-key reading the book warns against.
Afterlives
The first film, The Sea Beast (1926), with John Barrymore, let Ahab kill the whale and go home to marry. John Huston’s of 1956, with a Ray Bradbury script and Gregory Peck, is the one everyone remembers. Rockwell Kent’s illustrated edition of 1930 gave it its look, and Frank Stella spent a decade on a huge series of works named after its chapters. Laurie Anderson made a stage piece of it, and Jake Heggie an opera (2010). Ahab’s last curse is what Khan spits in Star Trek II (1982), and a coffee chain took Starbuck’s name, which is a joke nobody planned.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) opens with a sermon on “Blackness of Blackness” that echoes ch. 2. Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999) writes the woman Melville left ashore, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea (2000) tells the Essex story straight. Mystic Seaport and New Bedford hold marathon public readings, which is the right way to treat it: as something done together, over a long time.
How to read it
- Read the Extracts quickly and read the first twenty chapters for pleasure. They are the funniest in the book.
- Do not skip the whale chapters. If you must ration them, keep “Cetology”, “The Line”, “The Tail” and “The Try-Works”. They are the argument.
- Read Ahab’s speeches aloud. They are written for the ear.
- Watch the coffin. Follow it from ch. 110 to the Epilogue, and notice who it was made for.
Read next
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850). The book his new friend had just published: the other American study, in those two years, of obsession and guilt.
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). His last, unfinished work: another ship and another captain, written after decades away from fiction and published long after his death.
- Owen Chase, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821). The source, short and appalling.
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899). Another survivor telling us about a man who went too far in the name of a trade.
- Philip Hoare, Leviathan (2008). A modern writer’s obsession with whales, Melville and the sea, as digressive as its model.