moby dick essay

Introduction to Moby-Dick

Summary of moby-dick, major themes in moby-dick; or, the whale, major characters in moby-dick, writing style of moby-dick, analysis of the literary devices in moby-dick, related posts:, post navigation.

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Plot summary

Interpreting moby dick, context and reception.

What is Moby Dick ?

Why is moby dick a famous novel.

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• Table Of Contents

Moby Dick is a novel by Herman Melville , published in London in October 1851 as The Whale and a month later in New York City as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale . It is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne . Moby Dick is generally regarded as Melville’s magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels.

Where does Moby Dick take place?

The action of Moby Dick takes place largely on Captain Ahab ’s whaling ship, the Pequod , while sailing in the Atlantic , Indian , and Pacific oceans.

How was Moby Dick received when it was first published?

When Moby Dick was first published, the public was unimpressed. It sold fewer than 4,000 copies in total, including fewer than 600 in the United Kingdom. It was not until the mid-20th century that the work was recognized as one of the most important novels in American literature.

What is Moby Dick a metaphor for?

The whale Moby Dick has been interpreted as a metaphor for a great many things, from the Judeo-Christian God to atheism and everything in between. The ambiguity that Herman Melville built into his depiction of the whale makes Moby Dick capacious in its meaning.

Moby Dick gained recognition as an important American novel in the 1920s, more than half a century after its publication. Its fame subsequently grew, not least because it was widely included in university syllabi in the United States, where it was elevated to the status of a great American novel. Moby Dick has endured for two reasons: its virtuosic, bravura writing is a pleasure to read, and its near-mythical characters and plot have proved accommodating to interpretations by successive generations, which have found in the novel representations of imperialism , same-sex marriage , and climate change .

Moby Dick , novel by Herman Melville , published in London in October 1851 as The Whale and a month later in New York City as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale . It is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne . Moby Dick is generally regarded as Melville’s magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels.

Moby Dick famously begins with the narratorial invocation “Call me Ishmael.” The narrator , like his biblical counterpart, is an outcast. Ishmael, who turns to the sea for meaning, relays to the audience the final voyage of the Pequod , a whaling vessel. Amid a story of tribulation, beauty, and madness, the reader is introduced to a number of characters, many of whom have names with religious resonance . The ship’s captain is Ahab , who Ishmael and his friend Queequeg soon learn is losing his mind. Starbuck , Ahab’s first-mate, recognizes this problem too, and is the only one throughout the novel to voice his disapproval of Ahab’s increasingly obsessive behavior. This nature of Ahab’s obsession is first revealed to Ishmael and Queequeg after the Pequod ’s owners, Peleg and Bildad, explain to them that Ahab is still recovering from an encounter with a large whale that resulted in the loss of his leg. That whale’s name is Moby Dick. The Pequod sets sail, and the crew is soon informed that this journey will be unlike their other whaling missions: this time, despite the reluctance of Starbuck, Ahab intends to hunt and kill the beastly Moby Dick no matter the cost.

Ahab and the crew continue their eventful journey and encounter a number of obstacles along the way. Queequeg falls ill, which prompts a coffin to be built in anticipation of the worst. After he recovers, the coffin becomes a replacement lifeboat that eventually saves Ishmael’s life. Ahab receives a prophecy from a crew member informing him of his future death, which he ignores. Moby Dick is spotted and, over the course of three days, engages violently with Ahab and the Pequod until the whale destroys the ship, killing everyone except Ishmael. Ishmael survives by floating on Queequeg’s coffin until he is picked up by another ship, the Rachel . The novel consists of 135 chapters, in which narrative and essayistic portions intermingle, as well as an epilogue and front matter.

Moby Dick can sustain numerous, if not seemingly infinite , readings generated by multiple interpretative approaches. One of the most fruitful ways to appreciate the novel’s complexity is through the names that Melville gave to its characters, many of which are shared with figures of the Abrahamic religions. The very first line of Moby Dick , for instance, identifies Ishmael as the narrator; Ishmael was the illegitimate (in terms of the Covenant) son of Abraham and was cast away after Isaac was born. There are a number of other Abrahamic names in the book as well, including Ahab —who, according to the Hebrew Bible , was an evil king who led the Israelites into a life of idolatry. Melville’s Ahab is obsessed with Moby Dick, an idol that causes the death of his crew. The ship that saves Ishmael, the Rachel , is named for the mother of Joseph , known for interceding to protect her children. It is Rachel, as depicted in the Book of Jeremiah , who convinced God to end the exile placed upon the Jewish tribes for idolatry. The rescue of Ishmael by the Rachel in Moby Dick can thus be read as his return from an exile caused by his complicity (because he was on the Pequod ’s crew) in Ahab’s idolatry of the whale. Melville’s use of these names grants his novel a rich layer of additional meaning.

The whale itself is perhaps the most striking symbol in Moby Dick , and interpretations of its meaning range from the Judeo-Christian God to atheism and everything in between. Between the passages of carefully detailed cetology, the epigraphs, and the shift from a hero’s quest narrative to a tragedy, Melville set the stage for purposeful ambiguity . The novel’s ability to produce numerous interpretations is, perhaps, the main reason it is considered one of the greatest American novels.

Melville himself was well versed in whaling , as he had spent some time aboard the Acushnet , a whaling vessel, which gave him firsthand experience. He also did tremendous amounts of research, consulting a number of scientific sources as well as accounts of historical events that he incorporated into Moby Dick . In particular, the story of the Essex was one that fascinated Melville—and perhaps served as his primary inspiration for the novel. The Essex , a whaling vessel, was attacked by a sperm whale in 1820. The ship sank, and many of the crew members were either lost immediately or died of starvation as they awaited rescue for nearly eight months.

Melville also consulted the story of Mocha Dick, a famed whale who was, like Moby Dick, very white and aggressive and whose name was clearly an inspiration to Melville. Mocha Dick was often found off the coast of Chile in the Pacific Ocean , near Mocha Island. He lived during the early 19th century and became a legend among whalers. In 1839 a story about the whale was written in The Knickerbocker , which was likely the source of Melville’s discovery of Mocha Dick. Unlike Moby Dick, however, Mocha Dick was eventually killed and used for oil.

Melville befriended fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne during the writing of Moby Dick , which led to him dramatically revising the narrative to make it more complex. The novel is dedicated to Hawthorne because of his impact on Melville and the novel.

Once the novel was published, the public was unimpressed. It sold fewer than 4,000 copies in total, with fewer than 600 in the United Kingdom. It was not until the mid-20th century that the novel became recognized as one of the most important novels in American literature .

Natalie Roberts

Walter E. Bezanson- Work of Art:

In the first section the author discusses the “subject matter” in a “gross sense”. Which is considered, in our terms, the not-so-deep description of what Moby-Dick is about. He defines the Natural World (seas, oceans, animals of the sea, and weather), Historical World (Man as a land animal and who is constantly fighting nature to survive as well as important time periods), Artifacts (The Whale ship, Nautical equipment, Navigation equipment, Space of the ship, and processing equipment), Techniques (cytology chapters and explanation of the workings of the Artifacts), Social Organization (Owners, captain, mates, harpooners, and everyone else) and Object of the Voyage (killing whales). However, he sees this as a simple explanation of a complex and masterful piece of literature (defined as art).

He separates the two Ishmaels into the present (writing the book) and the past (being written about) to explain the structure of the story. Explaining the difference between the two he also acknowledges that you cannot completely separate the two. The distinction is made so that the reader is able to read the story from an outside point of view while Ishmael still being apart of that story “The story is his”. However, he also brings up the question, “But this [narrator Ishmael] is only Melville under another name, is he not?” which he also considers another aspect lending itself to the idea of Moby-Dick as an intricate piece of art.

While discussing the separate Ishmaels he is able to explain how each see the events, facts and images as symbols and how he (the young sailor Ishmael) and Captain Ahab both see similar things. Though Mr. Bezanson argues the Ahab often chooses to ignore the symbols and creates his own for his one-way reading and infereance of that symbol. By doing this Ahab’s struggle is more so tragic then if he had not seen the warnings.

After this he discusses the dream aspects, mechanical structure, as well as how there is a transition from The Scarlet Letter to Moby-Dick, calling it a shift from “world-as-machine” to “world-as-organism”. In the older there was reason and law but with the newer allowed for growth and development. Ishmael and the symbols are constantly moving throughout the book and adding as well as taking away from each other.

Serena Dusz & Makena Busch “Ahab and ‘The Larger, Darker, Deeper Part,” by John Wenke

Wenke has written a solid summary of Ahab’s character, but we disagree somewhat with his characterization of Ishmael. He defines the ‘nexus’ between Ishmael as ‘tyro actor and process narrator’ (Wenke 702). We disagree that Ishmael in any capacity resembles an actor throughout the book. He is more of the bias bystander who reports discussions and events from his point of view only. Wenke’s strongest argument concerns Ahab’s mental stability and consequent behavior. “ Within Ahab where two beings vie for sovereignty, the “living principle” is no match for the ‘characterizing mind.’” (Wenke 705). Wenke roughly sketches the idea that Ahab is almost schizophrenic in nature, being both a captain and a madman. While we agree with Wenke’s mental assessment of Ahab we feel like he dives of the deep end concluding his criticism. He associates Ahab to that of a god and attempts to mold Ahab and Ishmael into the same person. He explains that Ahab, “through the ‘unfathered birth’ of his ‘characterizing mind,’ locates himself on an equal plain with the immortals” (Wenke 706). While Ahab is socially reclusive we both don’t agree that he is in fact a god. He separates himself from the rest of the group because he is a lonely madman dwelling on his obsession with Moby-Dick and consequently becoming madder. We both enjoyed Wenke’s insightful theories and ideas about Ahab even when we disagreed.

Alex Graves/Andria Russiff

Harrison Hayford, "Unnecessary Duplicates

Critique of a Critique

Harrison Hayford’s “Unnecessary Duplicates” examined repetition in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick . The essay began by dauntingly listing pages of things repeated in the novel: inns, whales, other ships, captains, and so forth. The essay then presents Hayford’s main thesis, that many of the duplicates and discrepancies prove that Moby Dick was written out of order, that Melville never fully committed to a few of his characters, and finally that these things show Melville’s lack of overall commitment to the novel.

While Alex and Andria both agree that the disorganization and discrepancies perhaps indicate evolution of Bulkington, Peleg, and Queequeg, we completely disagree that this novel was born without Ahab. His charisma, deep, dark character, and goal drive this book.

We also both agree that Hayford raises some really good points about the organization of the novel and Melville’s purposes for repeating things. We also agree that the shore narrative could have been added afterwards and is nearly unnecessary as far as literary merit goes.

As far as the critique itself, it was interesting to read, but also quite tedious and unorganized. It was also amusing to read the words of someone who has probably read Moby Dick a hundred times.

Brad Pearce

The Melville Revival

The American writers who looked to Melville when creating their own novels saw an epic which shrugged convention and pushed American literature to new plateaus. The influence which Moby-Dick had on great literature is apparent through the whole book and increases my respect for Melville. The main difference in perceptions based on time periods is that the authors are discussing an obscure author who they feel should be more famous.

Jennifer Hartwig

Camille Paglia, " Moby-Dick as Sexual Protest"

Paglia focuses her argument on sexual protest, or the dehumanizing of women. The most significant points int eh essay include the way in which Melville describes Moby Dick. He does not want to portray his whale as the female grossness of matter, as he does the squid, but instead wants to admire its vast size. By elevating the masculine principle, Melville is limiting female power. Whenever Melville gives the whale a feminine trait, he immediately cancels it by a masculine afterthought, such as violence or rape. Paglia goes on to talk about male bonding between Queequeg and Ishmael. Paglia argues that masculinity struggles for dominance thorugout the story of Moby-Dick. Women only really exist in Moby Dick through "bawdy banter." I have a hard time believing/agreeing with Paglia's Argument. It seems that it is hard to dehumanize women when they don't exist in a particular story.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — Moby Dick

Essays on Moby Dick

Writing an essay on Moby Dick is a great way to show off your literary knowledge and writing skills. Plus, it's a classic novel with plenty of thought-provoking themes and characters to explore. So, let's dive in and see what kind of essay topics you can choose from.

When choosing a topic for your Moby Dick essay, consider what aspect of the novel you find most interesting. Do you want to explore the themes of obsession and revenge? Or maybe you're more interested in the symbolism of the white whale. Whatever it is, make sure to pick a topic that you're passionate about and can write a compelling argument for.

If you're into debating and persuading, an argumentative essay on Moby Dick might be just what you're looking for. You can argue about the morality of Captain Ahab's actions or the nature of the whale itself. For a cause and effect essay, you can explore the consequences of Ahab's obsession or the impact of the whale's actions. If you want to express your thoughts and feelings, an opinion essay on Moby Dick is perfect for diving into the characters' motivations or the novel's relevance today. And if you're all about facts and knowledge, an informative essay on Moby Dick can delve into the historical context or the author's life.

• The symbolism of the white whale in Moby Dick represents the unknowable nature of the universe.
• Captain Ahab's obsession with revenge mirrors the destructive nature of human ambition.
• The character of Ishmael serves as a lens through which to explore the themes of alienation and isolation in Moby Dick.

For your , you can start with a captivating quote from the novel or a brief overview of the plot. Then, you can introduce your thesis statement and provide some context for your argument. In your , you can summarize your main points and reiterate the significance of your argument. You can also leave your readers with a thought-provoking question or a call to action to further explore the themes of Moby Dick.

So, what are you waiting for? Start brainstorming your Moby Dick essay topic and get writing! With the right topic and a solid argument, you'll have an essay that's sure to impress.

The Role of The White Whale in Moby Dick

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October 18, 1851

Herman Melville

Novel, adventure fiction, epic, sea story, encyclopedic novel

Moby Dick, Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, Queequeg, Stubb, Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo

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77 Moby Dick Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best moby dick topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting moby dick topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about moby dick, ❓ moby dick questions.

• The Greatest Emptiness Concept in Moby Dick This paper analyzes Moby Dick, a mysterious symbol of an embodied terror and the inevitable tragedy of humanity, discusses the main characters of the novel, and summarizes the plot of the story.
• Literary Devices in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville In this paper, we explore the elements of literature used to describe Pip and Fleece and their relationship with Ahab and Stubb respectively.
• Herman Melville: Moby Dick or The Whale It seems to me that the story is called for teaching people not to escape God’s commands in order not to experience sufferings, as “we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, […]
• Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables” and Melville’s “Moby Dick”: Comparison of Novels The narration style in the both novels is different, wherein “Moby Dick” the merging of the narration and the main character of the novel is achieved during the first person narration in which there are […]
• How and Why Does Herman Melville Use Concentric Circles, Spirals, and Vortexes in Moby Dick? The author introduces his heroes as individuals: Ahab, on the one part, a brave sailor and a captain, who is always ready to meet any difficulties and reach his goal at any coast and a […]
• “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville The United States of America are comparable to the Pequod, in the sense that this country is a melting pot of cultures.
• Perspective on Religion Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• The Symbolic Meaning of the Whale in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• Exploring the Underlying Theme in “Moby Dick”
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• The Significance of Physical Markings in “Moby Dick,” “The Scarlet Letter,” and “The Birthmark”
• The Theme of Duality in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• Naturalism Analysis Through “Ethan Frome” and “Moby Dick”
• Environmental Consciousness From the Days of “Moby Dick” to Present Day
• White Symbolism in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• The Effect of Tension on Moral Judgment in the Story of “Moby Dick”
• The Passages in “Moby Dick” on the Herman Melville’s Oppression
• Concept of Quests in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• The Search for Peace and Calm in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• The Influence of the Allusion in “Moby Dick” on the Mean of Herman Melville’s Work
• The Unity of Soul and Body in “Moby Dick”
• The Depiction of the Whale as a God or Force of Nature in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• Pip Characterization in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• Biblical and Mytholigical Allusions of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• Comparison of “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare and “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• The Complex Elements of Disability in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• The Unwitting Vehicle for Evil in “Moby Dick”
• Man Versus Nature in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• The Portrayal of the Romantic Struggles in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• Primitive Beginnings in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• Life and Death in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• The Importance of the Relationship Between Pip and Ahab in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• The Influence of Color in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
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• An Analysis of the Character of Queequeg in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
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• The Relationship Between Man and the Judeo-Christian God in “Moby Dick”
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• An Analysis of the Richard Sewall’s Claims of “Moby Dick” as a Cruel Reminder of the Original Terror
• The Representation of the Racial Other in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
• The Role of the Coffin in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• Ambiguity of Omniscient Narration in “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
• How Do Tensions Impact Moral Judgement in the “Moby Dick” Story?
• How Would the Characters of “The Scarlet Letter” See the White Whale of Melville’s “Moby Dick”?
• Were Any Whales Killed During the Filming of “Moby Dick”?
• What Is the Novel “Moby Dick” About?
• How Does the Reader Consider the Relationship Between Nature and Civilization Portrayed in “Moby Dick”?
• Who Is the Owner of the “Pequod” in “Moby Dick”?
• What Are the Most Dramatic Chapters in “Moby Dick”?
• How Does Father Mapple’s Sermon at the Whaleman’s Chapel Relate to the Events of “Moby Dick”?
• What Is the Central Theme in Herman Melville’s Novel “Moby Dick”?
• What Are the Similarities Between the Story of “Moby Dick” and Jonah?
• Why Does Melville Present Different Perceptions of the Whale in “Moby Dick”?
• What Is the Message of “Moby Dick”?
• What Does Ahab Hope to Achieve by Battling Nature’s Mysteries in “Moby Dick”?
• Which Are Static Characters, and Which Ones Grow or Change Throughout the Novel “Moby Dick”?
• What Does Pip See When He Is Left Alone at Sea in “Moby Dick”?
• What Is Fedallah’s Role in the Novel “Moby Dick”?
• How Does Father Mapple’s Sermon Set the Tone for the Novel “Moby Dick”?
• What Is the Effect of Beginning “Moby Dick” With the Sentence “Call Me Ishmael”?
• What Reasons Are Stated and Implied for Ishmael Wanting to Go to Sea in “Moby Dick”?
• What Words Help to Establish the Mood of “Moby Dick”?
• What Is the Significance of the Painting Ishmael Sees at the Spouter-Inn in “Moby Dick”?
• What Happens to Moby Dick at the Story’s End?
• How Does Ishmael Justify His Choice to Worship Queequeg’s Little Wooden Idol in “Moby Dick”?
• Is Ishmael a Reliable Narrator in “Moby Dick”?
• How Does Ishmael Feel Toward Captain Ahab Before He Meets the Man in Person in “Moby Dick”?
• What Is Flask’s Nickname in “Moby Dick” and How Appropriate Is It?
• How Do Ishmael’s Ideas About Destiny and Free Will Compare to Those of Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick”?
• How Does Melville Use Weaving Imagery Throughout “Moby Dick”?
• What Is the Significance of Ishmael Characterizing Himself as an Orphan at the End of “Moby Dick”?
• In What Ways Is Captain Ahab (Ishmael) the Main Character of “Moby Dick”
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Discussion Questions

Describe the internal struggle that sends Ishmael on a whaling voyage. Alternately, describe Ahab’s, Starbuck’s, or any other crew members motivations for going whaling. How do they differ?

In your opinion, does Melville do enough to define Queequeg as his own person? How is Queequeg described differently than the more openly stereotypical depictions of, say, Fedallah and his crew? How are they similarly described?

What is a “heathen” and what is a “Christian” in Ishmael’s unorthodox point of view? How should one be guided by morality in general, according to his narration?

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Moby-Dick Essay

In the following essay, Davis, an associate professor of English at Northeast Louisiana University, describes how Moby-Dick reflects its author's philosophical, religious, and social ideals.

Since the revival of interest in Herman Melville in the early 1920s, Moby-Dick, the author's sixth novel, has come to be considered his masterpiece. Part romantic sea tale, part philosophical drama, the story of Ishmael, Ahab, and the white whale combines Melville's experiences aboard the whaler Acushnet with his later immersion in such classic authors as William Shakespeare, John Milton, François Rabelais, and Laurence Sterne. After several years as a sailor, both in the whale fleet and in the United States navy, Melville returned to his native New York in 1844 and soon began writing about his experiences. His earliest works, such as Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were loosely based upon his time in the Marquesas Islands and Tahiti. Melville's third novel...

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Moby Dick Herman Melville

Moby Dick literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Moby Dick.

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Moby Dick Essays

A modern epic: moby dick and the importance of metafiction anonymous college.

Moby Dick is not a story-driven book, but one that delves deeply into subjects such as fate, presence of God in daily life, and reading. Melville, a progressive and innovative writer, deploys the idea of reading and interoperation into every...

Death as an Aesthetic Experience in Moby-Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener Anonymous College

Moby Dick confronts us with problems of language before we encounter anything about whales. The first word in the book—after the table of contents—is “Etymology,” and the tale of the “pale Usher,” and Hackluyt’s quote, immediately raise questions...

The Attack on Transcendentalism Keegan Lerch

Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, attacks the views of the Transcendentalists by portraying Moby Dick, the white whale, as the personification of evil. This completely opposes the Transcendentalist idea that there is only good in the...

The Primitive In Herman Melville's Moby Dick Tim Gerasimov

Among the numerous themes and ideas that author Herman Melville expresses in Moby Dick, one of the less examined is the superiority of the primitive man to the modern man. As an undertone running through the entire book, one can see in Moby Dick...

Spiritual Reassessment and Moral Reconciliation Anonymous

In Fay Weldon's opinion, a good writer does not always need to conclude his story with a joyous flourish in order to satisfy his reader. "The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer...

Moby Dick as a Social Allegory Ryan Pifer

With his novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville uses the voyages of a New England whaler as a metaphor for the expansionist society in which he was living. Completed in 1851, the novel condemns America's values during the middle of the 19th century....

Captain Ahab's Journey of Self-Destruction Anne Marie Mackin

Captain Ahab, the fifty-eight year old commander of the Pequod, is one of the most fascinating mortals in literary history. The reader witnesses him teetering between sanity and madness, with the latter winning each slight battle and eventually...

The "Savage" as the Civilizer April Strickland

In studying the development of the early American novel, one might find it helpful to compare Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg in "Moby Dick" to Huck's relationship with Jim in "Huckleberry Finn". In each case, the "savage" actually humanizes...

Melville's Political Thought in "Moby-Dick" Jason Bedell

Melville's Political Thought in Moby-Dick

Herman Melville was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Because Rousseau died in 1778, 41 years prior to Melville's birth, Melville had access to all of Rousseau's writings....

Call Him Ishmael: The Reliability and Authority of Melville's Omniscient Narrator Kenneth Russo

Moby Dick is widely considered one of the greatest literary creations in history. The denseness of meaning, infinite possibility of interpretation, and ambiguity of implications give the text many layers. Therefore, knowing that the...

Emersonian Implosion: The Self-Reliant Man in Moby Dick and Keats' Poetry Jessica Rae Waggoner

Ralph Waldo Emerson's optimistic ideal of the “self-reliant man” in nature resonated in the literature of many of his contemporaries. Although many agreed with Emerson's principles, however, two major writers, Herman Melville and John Keats, chose...

The Whiteness of the Whale Timothy Sexton

The white whale at the center of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick is often considered to be one of the most symbolic characters in American literature. In part, this is because not only can the white whale mean many different things to each...

The Tragic Dimension of Moby Dick: "The Specksynder" Anonymous

Chapter 33 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, titled “The Specksynder,” is another of those non-narrative interstitial chapters that serves to give fits to many first-time readers, but that, like the others, contains within it a symbolic and...

Ishmael in Moby Dick Anonymous

Moby Dick ends with the unexpected death of everyone on the ship but Ishmael. Throughout the novel, the ship and its mates serve as a microcosm of the society for Melville to critique. Each character represents certain qualities and ideals that...

Ishmael’s Albatross Jennifer Baldwin College

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea!

This soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:

So lonely 'twas, that God himself

Scarce seemed there to be.”

-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

On the surface, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick suggests...

The Economics of Writing and Whaling Lindsey Marie McBride College

When Herman Melville began writing Moby-Dick, he felt constrained by his financial obligations. In a letter to his close friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville proclaims that “Dollars damn me” and clarifies, “What I feel most moved...

The Romantic Struggle in Moby-Dick Anonymous College

In Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, the struggle between the Romantic, religious, and at times over-emotional intent of characters and their reasonable nature creates the complexities faced on the Pequod, the ship captained by Ahab. This competition...

Symbolism in Chapter 87: The Grand Armada Crystal Wu 11th Grade

Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, is filled with symbolism and messages that relate to human behavior and the effects of that on the world. This is shown in Chapter 87 ‘The Grand Armada,’ which takes place while the Pequod is traveling through straits....

Racism and Racial Perceptions in "Moby-Dick" Aniqua Tultul 12th Grade

When you meet someone new, perhaps the best thing to do is not to “judge a book by its cover,” but is not doing so that a possibility in the world we live in? Not only relevant to today, judgment based on physical attributes traces back to the...

Close reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick Chapter 110 ‘Queequeg in his Coffin’ Anonymous College

Throughout Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick , the character of Queequeg, the New Zealander harpooner, is presented by Melville as possibly the most heroic and honestly good natured of the crew of the novels main setting, the whaling ship Pequod . He...

Ishmael’s Harmonization of Body and Soul in Moby Dick Anonymous College

Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick is well knows for the epic sea voyage that takes place over the course of the text. However, this journey doubles as not only a physical journey of movement from place to place but also a spiritual one. Ishmael’s...

Traits of Influence Samantha Sortijas 12th Grade

The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Moby Dick by Herman Melville feature two uniquely different characters who similarly strive for fulfillment amidst uncertainty and danger, completely devoid of moral qualms about extremities taken...

Starbuck and Pip’s Influences on Ahab: Failed Attempts at Salvation Anonymous 11th Grade

Friends are often expected to be brutally honest and tell others that what they are doing is wrong, from shoplifting to dating an abusive person. These are the duties of a friend in modern society, but the same conception of friendship as...

A Matter of Perspective: Purposeful Variation in Style and Viewpoint in the American Renaissance Anonymous College

Throughout history, America has often been depicted as a land of many freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of petition, thanks to the First Amendment. Slowly but surely, these...

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What “Moby-Dick” Means to Me

By Philip Hoare

The author in the Azores, among friends.

For years, “Moby-Dick” defeated me. I think I was put off the book when, as a child, I watched the 1956 John Huston film on our tiny black-and-white television, at home in suburban Southampton, England. Seeing it on the ghostly cathode-ray tube, which was housed in a veneered cabinet, was more like viewing some Victorian apparatus for contacting the departed spirits, forever imprisoned behind its glass.

Huston’s film promised so much—the rearing white whale, a monster of my deepest imaginings—but it delivered a wordy worthiness, quite remote from what I wanted from the story. Later, I’d look at the book itself and fail to find any way into its prose, as impermeable as that TV screen. I didn’t know then what I do now: that “Moby-Dick” can be whatever you want it to be. It took me thirty years to discover what the book was—or what it was not.

[#image: /photos/590953d66552fa0be682c84d] Now along comes Nathaniel Philbrick’s brilliant and provocative new work, “ Why Read Moby-Dick “—a collection of elegant essays, an eclecticism that it shares with its subject. Philbrick seeks to make us look again at the paradoxes of what he, like many others before him, acclaims as “the greatest American novel ever written.”

But “Moby-Dick” is not a novel. It’s barely a book at all. It’s more an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history. It is, above all, a sui-generis creation, one that came into the world as an unnatural, immaculate conception.

To my mind, there are only two other works with which it bears comparison: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818), and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847). The former, in its own witness to one man’s obsessive interference with nature, was a direct influence on Melville, who acquired a copy on a visit to London in 1849, even as the whalish shades were beginning to swirl about in his imagination.

We don’t know if Melville read Brontë’s rural, gothic creation, but its uncontained spirit—in which the wild Yorkshire moors themselves become the monster—would seem to me to be an apt fellow-traveller for the author who launched the Pequod into the mid-nineteenth century. All three books are caught between the primeval old and the impossibly new, between an abiding sense of certitude and the dissembling future.

In an age of uncertain faith, then as now, “Moby-Dick” resembles a religious tract, an alternative testament. Little wonder that one of its early set-pieces is Father Mapple’s fire-and-brimstone sermon from the prow-shaped pulpit in the Seamen’s Bethel, New Bedford, or that Philbrick takes the title for his own first chapter, “The Gospels in This Century,” from Melville’s wry and rather Wildean remark on the unsalability of his work: “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.” As he told Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and I feel as spotless as the lamb.”

When I finally began reading “Moby-Dick” (had I wasted my time before then?), I found I couldn’t put it down. I’d carry about with me a tiny, Oxford World Classics edition, anonymously bound in blue cloth, to be studied chapter by chapter, like the Bible or the Koran, as I sat on the Tube or on an airplane, or in the early hours of the morning. As Philbrick exhorts his readers, ” ‘Moby-Dick’ is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase will do.”

Much of the impact of Melville’s book on any fierce new convert is implicit in that sense of time travel. Sometimes I read it and I feel like I’m going backward, fast. It reads like something that was written before books were invented, yet it is utterly modern—pre-postmodern, perhaps. It is part of its own prediction, as if it and its characters had been there all along, and had only been waiting to be written. Just as in the real New Bedford’s Bethel a pulpit-prow had to be built, in the nineteen-sixties, because so many visitors expected to find one there; and, just as Melville wrote vividly of Nantucket, an island that he had yet to visit, much of “Moby-Dick” is conjured out of the air and the sea.

That’s why the book appeals so much to modern artists, like Frank Stella and Matthew Barney. Its oceanic reach and perverse digression provide endless sources of inspiration and interpretation. In chapters such as the famously sublime “The Whiteness of the Whale”—almost hallucinatory in its associative suspension of normality and subtle obscenity—Melville takes up his theme, then takes it apart, teasing it out to impossibly filigreed tendrils, until you wonder how you, or he, got there in the first place.

While reading “Moby-Dick” is a bit like being stoned, it also evokes an Asperger’s air. Ishmael will tell you everything you wanted to know about the whale, and much that he has made up. (Few books are so filled with neologisms; it’s as if Melville were frustrated by language itself, and strove to burst out of its confines.) At the same time, “Moby-Dick” stands both as a historical reference for the great age of Yankee whaling and as a work of imagination in which whales become avatars as much as they are real animals. Melville would never have finished his book today—he’d be constantly Googling “whale.” “God keep me from ever completing anything,” his existential alter ego complains. “This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

It always astonishes me that, just as my schoolmates and I were made to wade through Shakespeare and Dickens at an inappropriate age, American high-school students are subjected to Melville’s madness, with its subversion and, to modern eyes, overtly homoerotic passages. Indeed, part of the power of “Moby-Dick” lies in its latency, its delayed, time-bomb quality. It was virtually ignored in the author’s lifetime—its first edition never sold out, and the remaining copies went up in flames in a fire in the publisher’s downtown Manhattan warehouse in 1853.

Like a protean seed awaiting germination, the book needed a new element to bring it to life. As a result, when it burst into the new century, it came invested with a terrific momentum of its own—as if the world had just caught up with its fiery power. In the nineteen-twenties, this lost book was rediscovered by the Lost Generation. And, just as it was stoked up by the dark streets of London on that 1849 visit, “Moby-Dick” owed more than a little of its rebirth to a foreign land and the British writers who led the way in its reappraisal.

In 1923, D. H. Lawrence published his idiosyncratic, if not faintly crazy, “Studies in Classic American Literature.” Lawrence proclaimed Melville to be “a futurist long before futurism found paint,” the author of “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.” Lawrence’s paean was only the public eruption of a reputation already in revival. The year before, in 1922, T. E. Lawrence, of Arabia fame, reported that “Moby-Dick” took prime position on his “shelf of ‘Titanic’ books (those distinguished by greatness of spirit),” and two years after that, in 1924, noted, “Someone is working a Melville boom, & I’ve sold all my early editions profitably.”

In the summer of 1936, the aristocratic aesthete the Honourable Stephen Tennant was entertaining his friend Morgan Forster, at tea in a genteel hotel in the English Home Counties, talking avidly of Queequeg. Could Melville have ever imagined that his book would travel so far, and find such unlikely readers?

In the alchemical process of critical and cultural assimilation, Melville’s monstrous creation—like Shelley’s Creature, like Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy—took on, especially through its susceptible adaptations to other media, a modern typology of Manichean and cinematic proportions. A century and a half after it first played out, Ahab’s wanton chase was evoked in the “war on terror,” and the attempts to pursue an apparently uncatchable foe, even as it sourced an epic designed to reflect America’s first imperial venture—the getting of the oil that lit and lubricated the Western world.

Yet it has an even timelier message, one that, like so many of Melville’s literary grenades, seems to have been lying in wait for us. “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?” the book asks. Although, having posed this question, Melville, a perennial contrarian, comes to a contrary conclusion, his summary is certainly predictive. Three hundred and sixty thousand blue whales died in the cetacean Armageddon of the twentieth century, reducing the world’s largest animal to a population of just a few thousand.

Yet, in the wake of the moratorium on the hunting of great whales implemented by the International Whaling Commission, in 1986, whales appear to have recovered. Earlier this year, in the waters of the Indian Ocean off the tip of Sri Lanka, I saw dozens of blue whales, their thirty-foot blows as tall as houses. That vast biomass was an Edenic sight, a glimpse of the world before “Moby-Dick.” Blue whales now swim up the Irish Sea, and last month Captain Mark Dalomba was astonished to see one from the wheelhouse of his Dolphin Fleet whale-watch boat off Provincetown, on Cape Cod.

This summer, in the deep waters of the Azores, I swam with sperm whales. In the silence of their world, listening to the rhythm of their sonar clicks, feeling the scale of their social cohesion, I was more aware than ever before of the history that has passed between us. Now, as I pick up “Moby-Dick” again, prompted by Philbrick’s provocative book, I’m reminded of a salutary notion: that the whales that inspired Melville were around long before us, and may, with luck, outlive us, too.

“Wherefore … we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality… . In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s ark; and if ever the world is to be flooded again, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”

Philip Hoare is the author of “ The Whale .” He is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Marine Institute, Plymouth University, U.K., and is working on an audio edition of “Moby-Dick,” read by Tilda Swinton, John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow, and others.

Photograph: Andrew Sutton.

Books & Fiction

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By Louisa Thomas

By River Clegg

By Adam Iscoe

Five Books for People Who Really Love Books

These five titles focus on the many connections we can form with what we read.

My dad likes to fish, and he likes to read books about fishing. My mom is a birder; she reads about birds. There are plenty of books on both subjects, I’ve found, when browsing in a gift-giving mood. These presents don’t just prove I’m familiar with their interests. They’re a way to acknowledge that we read about our pastimes to affirm our identity: Fly-fishers are contemplative sorts who reflect on reflections; birders must cultivate stillness and attention. What we choose to read can be a way of saying: I am this kind of soul.

For my part, I like reading more than I like almost anything else. And so, in the manner of my parents, I like to read books about books . Writers who write about writing, readers who write about reading—these are people I instantly recognize as my kind. We’re people who are always in the middle of a chapter, who start conversations by asking, “What are you reading right now?” For us, a meta-book is like coffee brewed with more coffee. It’s extra-strength literature.

If you really love books, or you want to love them more, I have five recommendations. None of these are traditional literary criticism; they’re not dry or academic. They take all kinds of forms (essay, novel, memoir) and focus on the many connections we can form with what we read. Those relationships might be passionate, obsessive, even borderline inappropriate—and this is what makes the books so lovable. Finishing them will make you want to pick up an old favorite or add several more titles to your to-read list.

U and I , by Nicholson Baker

I can now say that I’ve been reading Baker for more than 20 years, or more than half my life. But I didn’t know that would happen when I found U and I in a college friend’s car, borrowed it, and never returned it. The subject, not the author, appealed to me then—I loved John Updike. And so did Baker, though love is probably not the right word. This book-length essay is not quite, or not merely, an appreciation of Updike; it’s a hilarious confessional “true story” of Baker’s anxieties, ambitions, competitive jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy in the face of Updike’s abundant body of work. It’s rich too, with wonderful observations on reading and writing in general, as in a passage considering how much more affecting a memoir becomes once the author is deceased: “The living are ‘just’ writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives , wow wow wow.”

A poem by John Updike: 'Half Moon, Small Cloud'

Dayswork , by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I almost prefer to keep certain books on my to-read list forever, where they remain full of magical possibility and cannot disappoint me. Moby-Dick is one of them. What if, God forbid, I chance to read it at the wrong time or in the wrong place and it doesn’t change my life? So I turn to Dayswork instead, which feels like cheating—you get some of the experience of reading Moby-Dick without any of the risk. This very novel novel, written collaboratively by a novelist and a poet who happen to be married, is sort of a sneaky biography of Herman Melville, framed by a meta-narrative about a woman writing a book during lockdown. This narrator delivers a parade of delightful facts and quotes and anecdotes, which she’s been collecting on sticky notes. You could think of it also as a biography of Melville’s most famous novel, which has had its own life after his death and touched so many other lives. Dayswork is fragmentary, digressive, and completely absorbing.

Read: The endless depths of Moby-Dick symbolism

Written Lives , by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Marías is one of my favorite novelists, but I only recently encountered this work, a collection of short, dubiously nonfictional biographies in a very specific style. In the prologue, Marías explains that he had edited an anthology of stories by writers so obscure, he was forced to compose their biographical notes using odd, scanty evidence that made it all sound “invented.” It occurred to him that he could do the same thing for authors much more famous (Henry James, Thomas Mann, Djuna Barnes), treating “well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated,” he explains. The result is marvelously irreverent, packed with unforgettable details (Rilke, supposedly, loved the letter y and used any excuse to write it) and endearing patterns (Marías would have us believe that many writers loathe Dostoyevsky). Written Lives immediately earned a spot on my shelf of most treasured objects, and every friend I’ve recommended it to has been equally enchanted.

Read: An introverted writer’s lament

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life , by Yiyun Li

This sad and incredibly beautiful memoir from a writer best known for her fiction takes its title from a line in a notebook by the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield. For Li, correspondence, diaries and journals, and literature in general are forms of consolation and companionship that make life worth living even in times of overwhelming despair. The memoir is a record of the reading experiences that saved Li from a dangerous depression. It made me want to dig more deeply into the work of all her favorite writers—Thomas Hardy, Ivan Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor—because she describes them so warmly and affectionately, as if they were friends. Here, as in her novels, Li is philosophical, with a gift for startling aphorisms: “Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured,” she writes. And “One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life,” or “What does not make sense is what matters.” Li’s work is so moving and so very wise.

Madness, Rack, and Honey , by Mary Ruefle

The American poet Mary Ruefle is one of those writers people like to call a “national treasure,” which always has to do with something beyond brilliance or talent, an additional spectacular charm that makes you wish you knew them in “real life.” This collection of lectures on poetry and topics adjacent to poetry (sentimentality, theme, the moon) is the perfect introduction to Ruefle’s particular charisma. She’s unabashedly devoted to poets and poems, but you don’t have to love poetry to fall in love with her voice. She’s plainspoken yet mysterious, always asking curious questions, about death and fear and secrets, and then answering herself with surprising authority. Ruefle is inclined toward quirky asides, but all roads lead back to books: “I offer my dinner guest, after dinner, the choice between regular and decaf coffee, when in fact I don’t have any decaf in the house,” she writes. “I am so sincere in my effort to be a good host that I lie; I think this probably happens all the time in poetry.” Ruefle offers a beautiful example of how a life filled with reading opens and alters the mind.

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