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Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Title page, first American edition of Moby-Dick

Author Herman Melville

Language English

Genre Adventure novel, Epic, Sea story

Publisher Richard Bentley (Britain)Harper & Brothers (U.S.)

Publication date October 18, 1851 (Britain)November 14, 1851 (U.S.)

Pages 635 (U.S. first edition)[1]

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is the sixth book by American writer Herman Melville. The work is an epicsea-story of Captain Ahab's voyage in pursuit of Moby Dick, a great white whale. It initially received mixed reviewsand at Melville's death in 1891 was remembered, if at all, as a children's sea adventure, but now is considered one ofthe Great American Novels and a leading work of American Romanticism.The opening line, "Call me Ishmael," is one of the most recognizable opening lines in Western literature. Ishmaelthen narrates the voyage of the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ahab has one purpose: revenge onMoby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed hisleg at the knee. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and the process of extracting whale oil, aswell as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status, goodand evil, and the existence of God.Melville uses a wide range of styles and literary devices ranging from lists and catalogs to Shakespearean stagedirections, soliloquies, and asides.

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Plot

Voyage of the Pequod (illustrated by EverettHenry).

The narrator, Ishmael, is an observant young man setting out fromManhattan Island who has experience in the merchant marine but hasrecently decided his next voyage will be on a whaling ship. On a cold,gloomy night in December, he arrives at the Spouter-Inn in NewBedford, Massachusetts, and agrees to share a bed with a then-absentstranger. When his bunk mate, a heavily tattooed Polynesian harpoonernamed Queequeg, returns very late and discovers Ishmael beneath hiscovers, both men are alarmed, but the two quickly become closefriends and decide to sail together from Nantucket, Massachusetts, on awhaling voyage.

In Nantucket, the pair sign on with the Pequod, a whaling ship that issoon to leave port. The ship’s captain, Ahab, is nowhere to be seen; nevertheless, they are told of him — a "grand,ungodly, godlike man,"[2] who has "been in colleges as well as 'mong the cannibals," according to one of the ship'sowners. The two friends encounter a mysterious man named Elijah on the dock after they sign their papers and hehints at troubles to come with Ahab. The mystery grows on Christmas morning when Ishmael spots dark figures inthe mist, apparently boarding the Pequod shortly before it sets sail that day.

The ship’s officers direct the early voyage while Ahab stays in his cabin. The chief mate is Starbuck, a serious,sincere Quaker and fine leader; second mate is Stubb, happy-go-lucky and cheerful and always smoking his pipe; thethird mate is Flask, short, stout, thoroughly reliable. Each mate is responsible for a whaling boat, and each whalingboat of the Pequod has its own pagan harpooneer assigned to it. Some time after sailing, Ahab finally appears on thequarter-deck one morning, an imposing, frightening figure whose haunted visage sends shivers over the narrator.One of his legs is missing from the knee down and has been replaced by a prosthesis fashioned from a sperm whale'sjawbone.

He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs withoutconsuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness... Threading its way outfrom among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till itdisappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicularseam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts downit, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off intothe soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.—Moby-Dick, Ch. 28

Soon gathering the crewmen together, with a rousing speech Ahab secures their support for his single, secret purposefor this voyage: hunting down and killing Moby Dick, an old, very large sperm whale, with a snow-white hump andmottled skin, that crippled Ahab on his last whaling voyage. Only Starbuck shows any sign of resistance to thecharismatic but monomaniacal captain. The first mate argues repeatedly that the ship’s purpose should be to huntwhales for their oil, with luck returning home profitably, safely, and quickly, but not to seek out and kill Moby Dickin particular — and especially not for revenge. Eventually even Starbuck acquiesces to Ahab's will, though harboringmisgivings.The mystery of the dark figures seen before the Pequod set sail is explained during the voyage's first lowering forwhales. Ahab has secretly brought along his own boat crew, including a mysterious harpooneer named Fedallah (alsoreferred to as 'the Parsee'), an inscrutable figure with a sinister influence over Ahab. Later, while watching one nightover a captured whale carcass, Fedallah gives dark prophecies to Ahab regarding their twin deaths.

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Moby Dick

The novel describes numerous "gams," social meetings of two ships onthe open sea. Crews normally visit each other during a gam, captainson one vessel and chief mates on the other. Mail may be exchangedand the men talk of whale sightings or other news. For Ahab, however,there is but one relevant question to ask of another ship: “Hast thouseen the White Whale?” After meeting several other whaling ships,which have their own peculiar stories, the Pequod enters the PacificOcean. Queequeg becomes deathly ill and, fearing an ordinary burial atsea, requests that a coffin be built for him by the ship’s carpenter. Justas everyone has given up hope, Queequeg changes his mind, decidingto live after all, and recovers quickly. His coffin becomes his sea chest,and is later caulked and pitched to replace the Pequod's life buoy.

Soon word is heard from other whalers of Moby Dick. The jollyCaptain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby has lost an arm to the whale,and is stunned at Ahab's burning need for revenge. Next they meet theRachel, which has seen Moby Dick very recently. As a result of theencounter, one of its boats is missing; the captain’s youngest son hadbeen aboard. The Rachel's captain begs Ahab to aid in the search forthe missing boat, but Ahab is resolute; the Pequod is very near the

White Whale now and will not stop to help. Finally the Delight is met, even as its captain buries a sailor who hadbeen killed by Moby Dick. Starbuck begs Ahab one final time to reconsider his thirst for vengeance, but to no avail.

The next day, the Pequod meets Moby Dick. For two days, the Pequod's crew pursues the whale, which wreakswidespread destruction, including the disappearance of Fedallah. On the third day, Moby Dick rises to the surface,revealing Fedallah's corpse, held to the whale by a tangle of harpoon ropes. Even after the initial battle on the thirdday, it is clear that while Ahab is a vengeful whale-hunter, Moby Dick, while dangerous and fearless, is notmotivated to hunt humans. As he swims away from the Pequod, Starbuck exhorts Ahab one last time to desist,observing that:

"Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!".—Moby-Dick, Ch. 135

Ahab ignores this voice of reason and continues with his ill-fated chase. As the three boats sail out to hunt him,Moby Dick damages two of them, forcing them to go back to the ship and leaving only Ahab's vessel intact. Ahabharpoons the whale, but the harpoon-line breaks. Moby Dick then rams the Pequod itself, which begins to sink. AsAhab harpoons the whale again, the unfolding harpoon-line catches him around his neck and he is dragged into thedepths of the sea by the diving Moby Dick. The boat is caught up in the whirlpool of the sinking ship, which takesthe crew on board to their deaths. Only Ishmael survives, clinging to Queequeg’s coffin-turned-life buoy for an entireday and night before the Rachel rescues him.

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CharactersThe crew-members of the Pequod are carefully drawn stylizations of human types and habits; critics have oftendescribed the crew as a "self-enclosed universe". There are 30 crew members, and as there were thirty states in theunion at the time, it has been suggested that, in its diversity, Melville meant the Pequod to be a metaphor forAmerica.[citation needed]

IshmaelIshmael, the only surviving crewmember of the Pequod, is the narrator of the book. As a character he is a few yearsyounger than as a narrator. His importance relies on his role as narrator; as a character, he is only a minor orperipheral crewmember. The name has come to symbolize orphans, exiles, and social outcasts — in the openingparagraph of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells the reader that he has turned to the sea out of a feeling of alienation fromhuman society. In the last line of the book, Ishmael also refers to himself symbolically as an orphan, which maintainsthe Biblical connection and emphasises the representation of outcasts. In the Book of Genesis, Ishmael is the son ofAbraham and his wife's maidservant, Hagar, whom his barren wife, Sarah, gives to her husband so he may have ason. When Sarah finally bears a son, Isaac, she decides Ishmael would not be a good influence on Isaac and thereforehas Abraham exile Hagar and Ishmael into the desert (Genesis 21:10).Ishmael has a rich literary background (he has previously been a schoolteacher), which he brings to bear on hisshipmates and events that occur while at sea. His assurance that "only I alone escaped to tell you" (tell thee) is themessenger's admonishment in Job 1: 15-17, 19.

ElijahThe character Elijah (named for the Biblical prophet Elijah, who is also referred to in the King James Bible as Elias),on learning that Ishmael and Queequeg have signed onto Ahab's ship, asks, "Anything down there about your souls?"When Ishmael reacts with surprise, Elijah continues:

Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though, I know many chaps that hav'n't gotany — good luck to 'em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon."—Moby-Dick, Ch. 19

Later in the conversation, Elijah adds:Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it wont be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as well these asany other men, God pity 'em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry Istopped ye.—Moby-Dick, Ch. 19

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Ahab

Moby Dick

Ahab is the tyrannical captain of the Pequod who is driven by amonomaniacal desire to kill Moby Dick, the whale that had maimedhim off the coast of Japan[3] during a previous whaling voyage.Although he is a Quaker, he seeks revenge in defiance of his religion'swell-known pacifism. Ahab's Biblical namesake is the evilidol-worshipping ruler in the Book of Kings, and this associationprompts Ishmael to ask, after first hearing Ahab's name:

When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick hisblood?

—Moby-Dick , Chapter 16. "The Ship"When Ishmael remarks upon the ill associations of such a name, he isrebuked by one of Ahab's colleagues, who points out that "He did notname himself."Little information is provided about Ahab's life prior to meeting MobyDick, although it is known that he was orphaned at a young age. Whendiscussing the purpose of his quest with Starbuck, it is revealed that hefirst began whaling at eighteen and has continued in the trade for fortyyears making him 58 years of age[4] and having spent less than three onland. He also mentions his "girl-wife", whom he married late in life,and their young son, but does not give their names.

Ahab ultimately dooms the crew of the Pequod (save for Ishmael) to death by his obsession with Moby Dick. Duringthe final chase, Ahab hurls his last harpoon while yelling his now-famous revenge line:

…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.—Moby-Dick, Chapter 135. "The Chase.—Third Day"

The harpoon becomes lodged in Moby Dick's flesh and Ahab, caught around the neck by a loop in his own harpoon'srope and unable to free himself, is dragged down into the cold oblivion of the sea by the injured whale. Themechanics of Ahab's death are richly symbolic. He is killed by his own harpoon, a victim of his own twistedobsession and desire for revenge. The whale eventually destroys the whaleboats and crew, and sinks the Pequod.Ahab's motivation for hunting Moby Dick is explored in the following passage:

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies whichsome deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangiblemalignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-halfof the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall downand worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, allmutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth withmalice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; allevil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon thewhale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then,as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.—Moby-Dick, Chapter 41. "Moby Dick"

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Captain BoomerCaptain of the Samuel Enderby of London, Ahab encounters him at sea. Boomer has not only seen Moby Dickrecently, but lost his arm to him in a previous attack. Like Ahab, he has replaced the missing limb with a prosthesismade of sperm whale bone. Ahab immediately assumes he has found a kindred spirit in his thirst for vengeance, butBoomer is yet another representation of the duality to be found throughout the novel; in this instance, a sane andrational counterpart to Ahab. While Boomer also anthropomorphizes Moby Dick, describing the "boiling rage" thewhale seemed to be in when Boomer attempted to capture him, he has easily come to terms with losing his arm, andharbors no ill-will against Moby Dick, advising Ahab "he's best left alone". The Enderby's doctor provides solidreasoning for this attitude, informing the gathering:

Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by DivineProvidence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man's arm? And he knows it too. Sothat what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow asingle limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints.—Moby-Dick, Ch. 100

Boomer jokingly tells a long yarn about the loss of his arm; this attitude, coupled with a lack of urgency in tellingwhere he sighted Moby Dick, infuriates Ahab, leading Boomer to query, "Is your captain crazy?" Ahab immediatelyquits the Enderby and is so hasty in his return to the Pequod that he cracks and splinters his whalebone leg, thenfurther damages it in admonishing the helmsman. While appearing to be whole, the leg is badly damaged and cannotbe trusted; it now serves as metaphor for its wearer.

Moby DickHe is a giant, largely (but not completely) white, bull sperm whale and arguably the main antagonist of the novel.Melville describes him as having prominent white areas around his wrinkled forehead and dorsal fin, the rest of hisbody being of stripes and patches between white and gray.[5] The animal's exact dimensions are never given butMelville claims in the novel that sperm whales can reach a length of ninety feet[6] (larger than any officiallyrecorded[7]) and that Moby Dick is possibly the largest sperm whale that ever lived. Other notable physical traits arean unusual spout, a deformed jaw, three punctures in his right fluke and several harpoons imbedded in his side fromunsuccessful hunts.[8] Having a near legendary reputation among whalers, several fatal encounters have beenattributed to him over a number of years, his attacks interpreted by some as being deliberate acts not of "anunintelligent agent."[9] He bit off Ahab's leg, leaving Ahab to swear revenge. The cetacean also attacked the Racheland killed the captain's son. At the end of the story he kills the entire crew of the Pequod, with the exception ofIshmael. The story does not tell whether he survives his own wounds after that. Although he is an integral part of thenovel, Moby Dick appears in just three of the 135 chapters and the reader does not have access to his thoughts andmotivations. Moby Dick is considered to be a symbol of a number of things, among them God, nature, fate, theocean, and the very universe itself.The symbolism of the White Whale is deliberately enigmatic, and its inscrutability is a deliberate challenge to thereader. Ishmael describes the whale’s forehead as having wrinkles and scars on it that look like hieroglyphics, andrecounts:

If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in itsprofounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of theSperm Whale’s brow? I put that brow before you. Read it if you can.—Moby-Dick, Ch. 79

All the reader can know is that the White Whale symbolizes many things to various characters in the novel. It is theirpersonal interpretations of Moby-Dick, in addition to their individual ruminations on the gold doubloon Ahab hasnailed to the mast to motivate his crew, that serve as a further clue to their own inner makeup.

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MatesThe three mates of the Pequod are all from New England. Starbuck, the young chief mate of the Pequod, is athoughtful and intellectual Quaker from Nantucket. He is married with a son. Such is his desire to return to them,that when nearly reaching the last leg of their quest for Moby Dick, he considers arresting or even killing Ahab witha loaded musket, and turning the ship back, straight for home. Starbuck is alone among the crew in objecting toAhab's quest, declaring it madness to want revenge on an animal, which lacks reason; such a desire is blasphemousto his Quaker religion. Starbuck advocates continuing the more mundane pursuit of whales for their oil. But he lacksthe support of the crew in his opposition to Ahab, and is unable to persuade them to turn back. Despite hismisgivings, he feels himself bound by his obligations to obey the captain. Starbuck was an important Quaker familyname on Nantucket Island, and there were several actual whalemen of this period named Starbuck, as evidenced bythe name of Starbuck Island in the South Pacific whaling grounds. The multinational coffee chain Starbucks wasnamed after Starbuck, not due to any affinity for coffee, but because the name "Pequod" was first rejected by one ofthe co-founders.Stubb, the second mate of the Pequod, is from Cape Cod, and always seems to have a pipe in his mouth and a smileon his face. "Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter werebut a dinner, and his crew all invited guests." (Moby-Dick, Ch. 27) Although he is not an educated man, Stubb isremarkably articulate, and during whale hunts keeps up an imaginative patter reminiscent of that of some charactersin Shakespeare. Scholarly portrayals range from that of an optimistic simpleton to a paragon of lived philosophicwisdom.[10]

Flask is the third mate of the Pequod. He is from Martha's Vineyard.

Harpooneers

Queequeg

The harpooneers of the Pequod are all non-Christians from variousparts of the world. Each serves on a mate's boat.

Queequeg hails from the fictional island of Rokovoko in the SouthSeas, inhabited by a cannibal tribe, and is the son of the chief of histribe. Since leaving the island, he has become extremely skilled withthe harpoon. He befriends Ishmael early in the novel, when they meetbefore leaving for Nantucket. He is described as existing in a statebetween civilized and savage. Queequeg is the harpooneer onStarbuck's boat, where Ishmael is also an oarsman. Queequeg is bestfriends with Ishmael in the story. He is prominent early in the novel,but later fades in significance, as does Ishmael.

Tashtego is described as a Gay Head (Wampanoag) Native Americanharpooneer. The personification of the hunter, he turns from huntingland animals to hunting whales. Tashtego is the harpooneer on Stubb'sboat.

Daggoo is a tall (6' 5") African harpooneer from a coastal village witha noble bearing and grace. He is the harpooneer on Flask's boat.

Fedallah is the harpooneer on Ahab's boat. He is of PersianZoroastrian ("Parsi") descent. He is described as having lived in China.At the time when the Pequod sets sail, Fedallah is hidden on board, and he later emerges with Ahab's boat's crew.Fedallah is referred to in the text as Ahab's "Dark Shadow". Ishmael calls him a "fire worshipper" and the crewspeculates that he is a devil in man's disguise. He is the source of a variety of prophecies regarding Ahab and hishunt for Moby Dick.

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Other notable charactersPip (nicknamed "Pippin," but "Pip" for short) is a African-American youth said to be from Tolland County,Connecticut, although he is referred to as "Alabama Boy". He is "the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew".Because he is physically slight, he is made a ship-keeper, (a sailor who stays aboard the ship while its whaleboats goout). Ishmael contrasts him with the "dull and torpid in his intellects" — and paler and much older — stewardDough-Boy, describing Pip as "over tender-hearted" but "at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jollybrightness peculiar to his tribe". Ishmael goes so far as to chastise the reader: "Nor smile so, while I write that thislittle black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king'scabinets."[11]

The after-oarsman on Stubb's boat is injured, however, so Pip is temporarily reassigned to Stubb's whaleboat crew.The first time out, Pip jumps from the boat, causing Stubb and Tashtego to lose their already-harpooned whale.Tashtego and the rest of the crew are furious; Stubb chides him "officially" and "unofficially," even raising thespecter of slavery: "a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama." The next time a whale issighted, Pip again jumps overboard and is left stranded in the "awful lonesomeness" of the sea while Stubb's and theothers' boats are dragged along by their harpooned whales. By the time he is rescued, he has become (at least to theother sailors) "an idiot," "mad." Ishmael, however, thought Pip had a mystical experience: "So man's insanity isheaven's sense." Pip and his experience are crucial because they serve as foreshadowing, in Ishmael's words,"providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy ofwhatever shattered sequel might prove her own." Pip's madness is full of poetry and eloquence; he is reminiscent ofTom in King Lear. Ahab later sympathizes with Pip and takes the young boy under his wing.Dough Boy is the pale, nervous steward of the ship. The Cook (Fleece), Blacksmith (Perth), and Carpenter of theship are each highlighted in at least one chapter near the end of the book. Fleece, a very old, half-deafAfrican-American with bad knees, is presented in the chapter "Stubb's Supper" at some length in a dialogue whereStubb good-humoredly takes him to task over how to prepare a variety of dishes from the whale's carcass. Ahab callson the Carpenter to fashion a new whalebone leg after the one he wears is damaged; later he has Perth forge a specialharpoon that he carries into the final confrontation with Moby Dick. Perth is one of the few characters whoseprevious life is given in much detail: his life ashore has been ruined by alcoholism.The crew as a whole is international, having constituents from both the United States and rest of the world. Chapter40, "Midnight, Forecastle," highlights, in its stage-play manner (in Shakespearean style), the striking variety in thesailors' origins. A partial list of the speakers includes sailors from the Isle of Man, France, Iceland, the Netherlands,the Azores, Sicily and Malta, China, Chile, Denmark, Portugal, India, England, Spain, and Ireland.

ShipsThe Pequod is named for the now extinct Pequot tribe of Native Americans. The Jerobeam, the Rachel, and theJungfrau are ships with Biblical names, with the last ship representing "the Five Foolish Virgins of Jesus's parable,who, going to meet the Bridegroom without oil in their lamps, tried to borrow from their five wise sisters. For MasterDerick de Deer of the Jungfrau, or Virgin as Ishmael obligingly translates, eagerly boards the Pequod to obtain oilfrom Ahab for his empty lamp-feeder."[12]

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Background

Melville's whaling yearsHerman Melville sailed from Fairhaven Massachusetts in 1841 aboard on the Acushnet.

After returning to land Melville wrote about his time whaling the mostly fictional "Moby Dick."

Melville's sourcesTwo actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820,after it was rammed by a large sperm whale 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America.[13]

First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinaryand Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick, in the waters off theChilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick was rumored to have twenty or so harpoons in his back from other whalers,and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity. One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for anarticle by explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York MonthlyMagazine.[14] Melville was familiar with the article, which described:

This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was an oldbull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak ofnature... a singular consequence had resulted - he was white as wool!

Significantly, Reynolds writes a first-person narration that serves as a frame for the story of a whaling captain hemeets. The captain resembles Ahab and suggests a similar symbolism and single-minded motivation in hunting thiswhale, in that when his crew first encounters Mocha Dick and cowers from him, the captain rallies them:

As he drew near, with his long curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the billows, weperceived that it was white as the surf around him; and the men stared aghast at each other, as they uttered, in asuppressed tone, the terrible name of MOCHA DICK!"Mocha Dick or the d----l [devil],' said I, 'this boat never sheers off from any thing that wears the shape of awhale."

Mocha Dick had over 100 encounters with whalers in the decades between 1810 and the 1830s. He was described asbeing gigantic and covered in barnacles. Although he was the most famous, Mocha Dick was not the only whitewhale in the sea, nor the only whale to attack hunters.[15]

While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the Union in 1807,[16] it was notuntil August 1851 that the whaler Ann Alexander, while hunting in the Pacific off the Galapagos Islands, became thesecond vessel since the Essex to be attacked, holed and sunk by a whale. Melville remarked:

Ye Gods! What a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & verymuch to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.[17]

While Melville had already drawn on his different sailing experiences in his previous novels, such as Mardi, he hadnever focused specifically on whaling. The eighteen months he spent as an ordinary seaman aboard the whalerAcushnet in 1841-42, and one incident in particular, now served as inspiration. It was during a mid-ocean "gam"(rendezvous at sea between ships) that he met Chase's son William, who lent him his father's book. Melville laterwrote:

I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; . . . he went to his chest & handed me a completecopy . . . of the Narrative [of the Essex catastrophe]. This was the first printed account of it I had everseen. The reading of this wondrous story on the landless sea, and so close to the very latitude of theshipwreck, had a surprising effect upon me.[18]

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The book was out of print, and rare.[19] Knowing that Melville was looking for it, his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw,managed to find a copy and buy it for him. When Melville received it, he fell to it almost immediately, heavilyannotating it.[20]

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick contains large sections—most of them narrated byIshmael—that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot but describeaspects of the whaling business. Although there had been a successfulearlier novel about Nantucket whalers, Miriam Coffin or TheWhale-Fisherman (1835) by Joseph C. Hart,[21] which is credited withinfluencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whalingtended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny, and Melville believedthat no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in asfascinating or immediate a way as he had experienced it. EarlyRomantics also proposed that fiction was the exemplary way todescribe and record history, so Melville wanted to craft somethingeducational and definitive.

Composition

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small redfarmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850.[22]

He became friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Melvillebeginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hostedby a mutual friend.[23] Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, and hisunsigned review of the collection, titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", was printed in the The Literary World onAugust 17 and 24.[24] The essay is "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writingMoby-Dick," Bezanson finds, "as to be everybody's prime piece of contextual reading; it could be printed almost as apreface, as relevant to Moby-Dick as Whitman's Preface would be to his 1855 Leaves of Grass." Hawthorne iscompared to Shakespeare and Dante, and it is "impossible to miss Melville's self-projection" in the repeats of theword "genius, the more than twenty-five references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that "Shakespeare'sunapproachability" is nonsens for an American.

The earliest surviving mention of the composition of the then unnamed work[][25] is the final paragraph of the letterMelville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850:

About the "whaling voyage"--I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion so jumpswith mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may getoil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one mustneeds throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of thewhales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.[26]

Less than two months later, in a letter of June 27, Melville reported to Richard Bentley, his English publisher:My Dear Sir,--In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write younow to propose its publication in England.The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certainwild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personalexperience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.[27]

The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850-1851, when Melville had changed the noise of New York City for a farm in Pittsfield. During these months, he wrote several letters to Hawthorne which show that "Melville's moods are cyclical, from letter to letter (and even within one letter)." A letter from June 1851 summarizes Melville's career in three sentences: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay.

Moby-Dick 11

Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."[28] This isstill the same stubbornness of the Melville who stood by Mardi and talked about his other, more commercial bookswith contempt. The letter contains a revealing passage of how Melville experienced his development from his 25thyear: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould."[29]

Bezanson's analysis of the evidence implies the conclusion that Melville's imagination unfolded in a way that he didnot anticipate in the spring of 1850, an unfolding that led his book to evolve and expand along the lines of its originalconception rather than departing from it.The book would be finished a year later than announced (the author's role of harpooner was not accurate either),giving room for scholars to develop a theory about the work's course of completion which holds that Melville'soriginal conception was a straight narrative of a whaling voyage, only changed into the book it became after he metHawthorne.[30][31] The theory has been harpooned in two ways by Bezanson: he disagrees with both the underlyingassumption about Melville's intellectual development before 1850 and the way scholars have been evaluating theevidence. "The implication here," Bezanson argues, "is that Melville was not ready for the kind of book Moby-Dickbecame, that he despaired of picking up where he had left off with Mardi, that the critics, or financial need, orself-doubt, or a combination of these for six months had him tied down. But the profile that emerges from readingthe documents, beginning with the almost rudely bold letter he wrote to John Murray on 25 March 1848, a virtualdeclaration of literary independence, takes quite another shape." Melville's letters of this period show himdenouncing his last two straight narratives, Redburn and White-Jacket, as two books written just for the money, andhe firmly stood by Mardi as the kind of book he believed in. His language is already "richly steeped in seventeenthcentury mannerisms," which are characteristic of the style of Moby-Dick.The Dana letter quoted above is the major source for arguing that Melville started out writing another kind of bookthan it became, but the language of the letter contains many ambiguities. The usual assumption, Bezanson argues, "isthat Dana's 'suggestion' would obviously be that Melville do for whaling what he had done for life on a man-of-warin White-Jacket." But J. Ross Browne had already accomplished that, said Melville in his 1847 review. In addition,Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic story telling when he met him in Boston, soperhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift." And the long sentence in the middle ofthe above quotation simply acknowledges that Melville is struggling with the problem, not of choosing between factand fancy but of how to interrelate them. The most positive statements are that it wille be a strange sort of a bookand that Melville means to give the truth of the thing, but what thing exactly is not clear.Melville's four "quite wonderful" letters from November 1848 to April 1849 to Evert A. Duyckinck are evidence ofthe "immense leap of his ambitions" since the writing of Mardi. The second letter, dated February 24, 1849, dates thebeginning of the development of the Shakespearean style of Moby-Dick: Melville, just having acquired aShakespeare edition, describes his discovery of Shakespeare "as if he had never heard of him before."

It is an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, & the top of every "t" like amusket barrel. Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never madeclose acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he's full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye,almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakespeare in heaven rankswith Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare's person.--I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But untilnow, every copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to myeyes which are tender as young sparrows. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition. I now exultover it, page after page.[32]

Less than two weeks later, on March 3, Melville wrote again on Shakespeare, already with a hint ofself-projection[33] when he described the superior writing circumstances Shakespeare would have experienced inpresent-day America as opposed to Elizabethan England.

Moby-Dick 12

I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had thepleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fineDuyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, mightnot have intercepted Shakspere's full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not afrank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant Universe is, or can be? But theDeclaration of Independence makes a difference.[34]

Publication historyMelville first proposed the English publication, in his letter from June 27, 1850 to Richard Bentley. Usually,Tanselle explains, "proof sheets of the American edition were sent to the English publisher and...Americanpublication was held up until after the work had been set in type and published in England. Given the uncertain legalstatus of the English copyright for an American work, this procedure was generally regarded as providing thestrongest claims for such a copyright".[35] Eventually the new book was finished almost a year later than Melvillehad announced, and the lack of income from the delayed book forced him to borrow money, as the Harpers haddenied him an advance.[36]

Probably to save time in advance of finding an American publisher, Melville arranged for the typesetting and platingof his book: the Harper publishing contract signed on September 12 mentions "the stereotype plates now in thepossession of R. Craighead."[37] Robert Craighead, who had printed Typee before, had a shop in New York. Therewould be less delay in publishing once an agreement was reached, plus proceedings for the English publication couldmove forward.[38]

In June he found himself in New York, in a "third-story room, and work and slave on my 'Whale' while it is drivingthrough the press", as he wrote to Hawthorne.[39] By the end of the month he was back in Pittsfield, now writing toHawthorne that "'The Whale' is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delay of printers" Melvillecame back to the grass to "end the book reclining on it, if I may." Three weeks later, the typsesetting was almostdone, as he announced in a letter to Bentley from July 20: "I am now passing thro' the press, the closing sheets of mynew work." Melville was simultaneously working on his manuscript and proofreading what had been set. After thereturning of his corrected proof the type would be plated, so that the text of earlier parts of the book was alreadyfixed when he was revising the later parts, and Melville must have "felt restricted in the kinds of revisions that werefeasible."[40] Tanselle suggests that the following quotation from Melville's next book, Pierre, or the Ambiguities(1852) reflects the experience of finishing Moby-Dick.

At length, domestic matters--rent and bread--had come to such a pass with him, that whether or no, thefirst pages must go to the printer; and thus was added still another tribulation; because the printed pagesnow dictated to the following manuscript, and said to all subsequent thoughts and inventions ofPierre--Thus and thus; so and so; else an ill match. Therefore, was his book already limited, bound over,and committed to imperfection, even before it had come to any confirmed form or conclusion at all. Oh,who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in authorship that is high?[41]

On July 3, 1851, Bentley wrote to Melville, offering him ₤150 and "half profits", which offer Melville accepted in aletter dated July 20, after which Bentley drew up a contract on August 13. The term half profits meant the author"was to receive half the profits that remained after deducting all the expenses of production and advertising".[42]

Melville signed and returned the contract in early September, and then went to New York to hand the proof sheets,this set made from the finished plates, over to his brother Allan, who sent them to London on September 10.Melville had had these proofs in his possession for over a month, and could devote all his time to carefully correctand revise them as extensively as he saw fit, because the book would have to be set anew anyway. At this time hehad not yet settled with an American publisher, so "there was not the usual urgency about getting the sheets abroadso that English publication could precede American."[43] He had every reason to correct them carefully, if thefollowing passage from Pierre is an accurate description of his correction of the summer in New York.

Moby-Dick 13

As every evening, after his day's writing was done, the proofs of the beginning of his work came homefor correction. Isabel would read them to him. They were replete with errors; but preoccupied by thethronging, and undiluted, pure imaginings of things, he became impatient of such minute, gnat-liketorments; he randomly corrected the worst, and let the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvestthus furnished to the entomological critics.[44]

The text of the already plated American edition would be expensive to change, so that the English reading would bethe revised one in case of differences between the two editions. The English edition differs from the American inover 700 wordings, in addition to thousands of instances of punctuation and spelling. The most obvious revision isthe addition in Chapter 87, "The Grand Armada", of a footnote on the word "gally", which is no part of the Americanedition.Bentley received the proof sheets, with Melville's corrections and revisions marked on them, on September 24,[45]

Bentley received the proof sheets with Melville's corrections and revisions marked on them, and published it lessthan four weeks later.

Last-minute change of titleAfter Melville had given the proof sheets for Bentley to his brother Allan, he continued to make alterations, even avery important one: he changed the title. Probably late in September, Allan sent Bentley two pages of proofaccompanied by a letter of which only an undated draft survives:

Since sending proofs of my brothers new work by the Asia on the 10th he has determined upon a newtitle & dedication--Enclosed you have proof of both--It is thought here that the new title will be a betterselling title--It is to be hoped that this letter may reach New Burlington Street before it is too late toadopt these new pages.Moby-Dick is a legitimate title for the book, being the name given to a particular whale who if I may soexpress myself is the hero of the volume.[46]

Changing the title was no problem for the American edition, since the running heads throughout the book onlyshowed the titles of the chapters, and the title page itself could only be printed after a publisher was found, whosename would also appear on the title page. The October issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine printed chapter 54,"The Town-Ho's Story", with a footnote saying: "From The Whale. The title of a new work by Mr. Melville, in thepress of Harper and Brothers, and now publishing in London by Mr. Bentley." Evidently copy for the issue was stillalterable on September 14, since the death of James Fenimore Cooper was announced. The only one surviving leafof proof, "a 'trial' page bearing the title 'The Whale' and the Harper imprint,"[47] and this shows that some point afterthe publishing agreement the original title still stood.The English edition was in three volumes, each having a title page, and each having the title printed on the first pageof the text as well. Changing the title pages was possible, but printing of the text may already have begun or evenbeen finished when Allan's letter arrived. When it did arrive, no sooner than in early October, Bentley had alreadyannounced The Whale in both the Athenaem and the Spectator of October 4 and 11.[48] Probably to accommodateMelville, Bentley inserted a half-title page in the first volume only, which reads "The Whale; or, Moby Dick."On October 18, the English edition, The Whale, was published; the London Morning Herald for October 20 printedthe earliest known review. Only 500 copies were printed: the figure for both Mardi and White-Jacket had been 1,000and that for Redburn 750. Bentley's experience in the slow sales of Melville's previous books had convinced him thata smaller number was more realistic.[49]

On November 14, the American edition, Moby-Dick, was published, and the same day reviewed in both the AlbanyArgus and the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer. On November 19, Washington received the copy depositedfor copyright purposes. The first printing of 2,915 copies was almost the same as the first of Mardi, but the firstprinting of Melville's other three Harper books had been a thousand copies more.[50]

Moby-Dick 14

American vs. English editionAt numerous points the editions differ from each other, the title being only the most obvious difference. The Englishmulti-volume edition necessitated a change in the dedication to Hawthorne: "this book is" was adjusted to "thesevolumes are."[51] The table of contents in the English edition generally follows the actual chapter titles in theAmerican edition, and therefore must have been drawn from the proof sheets, probably by a clerk of Bentley's.Nineteen titles in the American table of contents differ from the titles above the chapters themselves. This list wasprobably drawn up by Melville himself: the titles of chapters describing encounters of the Pequod with other shipshad—apparently to stress the parallelisms between these chapters—been standardized to "The Pequod meets the...",with the exception of the already published 'The Town-Ho's Story'.[52] For no apparent reason, the "Etymology" and"Extracts" had been moved to the back of the edition, probably reflecting Bentley's own judgment "that they weresomehow inappropriate for the opening pages of a novel."[53] An epigraph from Paradise Lost, included in thesecond of the two quotations from that work in the American edition, appears on the title page of each of the threeEnglish volumes.[54]

The final difference concerning the material not already plated is the presence of the "Epilogue," which accountsIshmael's miraculous survival, in the American edition, and its absence in the English. Obviously the epilogue wasnot an afterthought too late for inclusion in the English edition, for it is referred to in "The Castaway": "in the sequelof the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself."[55] Why the "Epilogue" is missing, isunknown. Expurgation seems an unlikely explanation, as there seems to be nothing objectionable in it. Most likely itwas somehow lost while the preliminaries were moved to the back. In case it should have been misplaced inBentley's office, it would not be so easy for anyone to recognize what book it was part of as it had no page number orrunning title, as the other pages did.[56] The only paragraph it consists of does not refer to whaling nor does it featurethe name Ishmael, though Ahab's name is mentioned once.British reviewers read a book with a first-person narrator who apparently did not survive to tell the tale.[57] Thereviewer of the Spectator objected that "nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossiblefor the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish."[58]"Two papers, the Dublin University Magazine and the Literary Gazette, asked "how does it happen that the author isalive to tell the story?" respectively how the writer, "who appears to have been drowned with the rest, communicatedhis notes for publication to Mr. Bentley is not explained."

Melville's corrections and revisions to the English edition

The largest of Melville's revisions is the addition to the English edition of a 139-word footnote on the word "gally."The edition also contains six short phrases and some sixty single words lacking in the American edition.[59] Inaddition to this, there are about thirty-five changes that produce genuine improvements, as opposed to merecorrections: "Melville may not have made every one of the changes in this category, but it seems certain that he wasresponsible for the great majority of them."[60] The most convincing example appears near the end of chapter 135,where Tashtego, in the mast of the sinking Pequod his head already under water, hammers a bird to the mast andthen freezes in his "death-grasp." The insertion of an "r", missing in the American edition, restores the oppositionwith the "ungraspable phantom of life" in the opening chapter, "Loomings."

Moby-Dick 15

Censorship of the English edition

Bentley placed the proof sheets in the hands of one or more revisers to purge the book of any material that mightgive offense. These expurgations fall into four categories, ranked according to the apparent priorities of the censor:1. Sacrilegious passages, more than 1200 words. For example in chapter 28, "Ahab," Ahab stands with "a

crucifixion" in his face" and this was revised to "an apparently eternal anguish."[61]

2. Sexual matters, including the sex life of whales and even Ishmael's worried anticipation of the nature ofQueequeg's underwear.[62]

3. Remarks "belittling royalty or implying a criticism of the British." This meant the exclusion of the completechapter 25, a "Postscript" on the use of sperm oil at coronations.[63] "Think of that, ye loyal Britons!" the chapterends, "we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!"

4. Perceived grammatical or stylistic anomalies were treated with "a highly conservative interpretation of rules of'correctness'."[64] A large number of the variants in wording here make so little difference that it is hard to seewhy they were made.

These expurgations also meant that any corrections or revisions Melville may have marked upon these passages arenow lost.

Critical reception

Melville's expectationsIn a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne written within days of Moby-Dick's American publication, Melville made anumber of revealing comments:

... for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, orany one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is Jove appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has gotto the meaning of his great allegory—the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paperallegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity.[65]

A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your understanding the book. Ihave written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable sociabilities are in me. I would sitdown and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling—no hopefulnessis in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speaknow of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.[66]

You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervadingthought that impelled the book—and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough todespise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.[67]

ContemporaryMelville was regarded as a very successful author after the acclaim received by his popular earlier works of Typeeand Omoo. He considered Moby-Dick to be his magnum opus, but he was shocked and bewildered at the scathingreviews it received. Instead of bringing him the literary acclaim which he sought, this masterwork started a slidetoward literary obscurity in his lifetime. This was partially because the book was first published in England, and theAmerican literary establishment took note of what the English critics said, especially when these critics wereattached to the more prestigious journals. Many critics praised it for its unique style, interesting characters, andpoetic language,[68] but others agreed with a critic with the highly regarded London Athenaeum, who described it as:

[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected storyhas obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The styleof his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly,

Moby-Dick 16

and obscurely managed.One problem was that publisher Peter Bentley botched the English edition, most significantly in omitting theepilogue. For this reason, many of the critics faulted the book, what little they could grasp of it, on purely formalgrounds, e.g., how the tale could have been told if no one survived to tell it. The generally bad reviews from acrossthe ocean made American readers skittish about picking up the tome. Still, a handful of American critics saw muchmore in it than most of their U.S. and English colleagues. Hawthorne said of the book:

What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his precedingones.[69]

Another problem was that by the time the book was published, whaling and maritime adventuring were no longer themain focus of the American public. The Gold Rush had shifted their interest to the West, and the lengthy novel, withits long factual passages dealing with the brutal technology of the whaling industry, seemed far less relevant to theauthor's American audience.

UndergroundWithin a year after Melville's death, Moby-Dick, along with Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, was reprinted by Harper &Brothers, giving it a chance to be rediscovered. However, only New York's literary underground seemed to takemuch interest, just enough to keep Melville's name circulating for the next 25 years in the capital of Americanpublishing. During this time, a few critics were willing to devote time, space, and a modicum of praise to Melvilleand his works, or at least those that could still be fairly easily obtained or remembered. Other works, especially thepoetry, went largely forgotten.Then came World War I and its consequences, particularly the shaking or destruction of faith in so many aspects ofWestern civilization, all of which caused people concerned with culture and its potential redemptive value toexperiment with new aesthetic techniques. The stage was set for Melville's legacy to find its place.

The Melville RevivalWith the burgeoning of Modernist aesthetics (see Modernism and American modernism) and the war that toreeverything apart still so fresh in memory, Moby-Dick began to seem increasingly relevant. Many of Melville'stechniques echo those of Modernism: kaleidoscopic, hybrid in genre and tone, monumentally ambitious in trying tounite so many disparate elements and loose ends.In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about Melville's value.In the 1920s, British literary critics began to take notice. In his idiosyncratic but landmark Studies in ClassicAmerican Literature, novelist, poet, and short story writer D. H. Lawrence directed Americans' attention to the greatoriginality and value of many American authors, among them Melville. Perhaps most surprising is that Lawrencesaw Moby-Dick as a work of the first order despite his using the original English edition.In his 1921 study, The American Novel, Carl Van Doren returned to Melville with much more depth. He calledMoby-Dick a pinnacle of American Romanticism.

Post-revivalThe next great wave of Moby-Dick appraisal came with the publication of F. O. Matthiessen's AmericanRenaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.[70] Published in 1941, the book proposed thatEmerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville were the most prominent figures of a flowering of conflicted(and mostly pre-Civil War) literature important for its promulgation of democracy and the exploration of itspossibilities, successes, and failures. Matthiessen's book came out shortly before the entry of the U.S. into WorldWar II, critic Nick Selby argues that

Moby-Dick 17

… Moby-Dick was now read as a text that reflected the power struggles of a world concerned to upholddemocracy, and of a country seeking an identity for itself within that world.[71]

AdaptationsThe novel has been adapted a number of times in various media including the stage, radio, TV, comics and graphicnovels and movies. The most famous of these was the John Huston film of 1956 produced from a screenplay byauthor Ray Bradbury. These plays have varied from a the stage version called Moby Dick! The Musical to a 2010film adaptation of the same name.

Notes[1] Moby-Dick or The Whale, Northwestern-Newberry edition (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 687.[2] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=bfxdx--G2-QC& pg=PA96& dq) p. 96[3][3] Melville p. 159[4][4] Melville p. 620[5] Melville, Herman. (1851) Moby~Dick or, the Whale, 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Books, 2001), p. 198-9[6] Melville, Herman. (1851) Moby~Dick or, the Whale, 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Books, 2001), p. 493[7] Ellis, Richard. (2011). The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Oceans Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creature. USA:

University Press of Kansas. p. 432.[8] Melville, Herman. (1851) Moby~Dick or, the Whale, 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Books, 2001), p. 176-7[9] Melville, Herman. (1851) Moby~Dick or, the Whale, 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Books, 2001), p. 199[10] Dagovitz, Alan. "Moby Dick's Hidden Philosopher: A Second Look at Stubb" in Philosophy and Literature Oct 2008[11][11] All quotes are taken from Chapter 93, "The Castaway".[12] Nathalia Wright, Melville's Use of the Bible. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1949, 71.[13] Faiella, Graham, Moby Dick and the whaling industry of the 19th century (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=OdZkZXZPxuIC&

printsec=frontcover), New York : The Rosen Publishing Group, 2004. Cf. Chapter 3, "Moby Dick: The Inspiration".[14] Reynolds, J.N., "Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal," The Knickerbocker, or New-York

Monthly Magazine. 13.5, May 1839, pp. 377–392.[15][15] , 66-79[16] Report of the Commissioner By United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, p115 (http:/ / books. google. com/

books?id=DMwEAAAAQAAJ& lpg=PA115& ots=wLKjJyW1K_& dq=the ship union, of Nantucket September, 1807 Edmund Gardner&pg=PA115#v=onepage& q=the ship union, of Nantucket September, 1807 Edmund Gardner& f=false)

[17] Melville's Reflections, a page from The Life and Works of Herman Melville (http:/ / www. melville. org/ hmquotes. htm)[18] Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951 p. 119.[19] Beaver, Harold. "On the Composition of Moby-Dick" (1972), 17, in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, ed. Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin

(1972; reprint 1986), 17. ISBN 0-14-43082-2.[20][20] Beaver, 17.[21] Mary K. Bercaw, "A Fine, Boisterous Something": Nantucket in Moby-Dick, Historic Nantucket, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Fall 1991); Philip

Armstrong, What animals mean in the fiction of modernity, Routledge, 2008, p.132[22][22] Miller, 274.[23] Cheever, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and

Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. ISBN 0-7862-9521-X)p. 174.[24][24] Miller, 312.[25] Herman Melville, Correspondence. The Writings of Herman Melville Volume Fourteen. Edited by Lynn Horth. Northwestern University

Press and The Newberry Library, Evanston and Chicago, 1993, 160.[26][26] Melville 1993, 162.[27][27] Melville 1993, 163.[28][28] Melville 1993, 191.[29][29] Melville 1993, 193.[30] The development of the theory is described in Harrison Hayford, "Historical Note Section V," in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The

Whale. The Writings of Herman Melville Volume Six, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. TheNorthwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, Evanston and Chicago, 1988, 648-59.

[31][31] Cf. Bryant, Pp.65-90. Cf. especially the section on "Two Moby-Dicks: Legend and form". Quoting, pp.66-67, "Scholars have longspeculated that Melville's friendship with Hawthorne, as well as his absorption of Shakespeare, triggered a significant reorientation ofMoby-Dick. The view is that Melville began to write a narrative of whaling fact (like his naval documentary White-Jacket) to be completed byfall 1850. ... However, sometime after the August encounter with Hawthorne, Melville recast the book entirely to include the

Moby-Dick 18

Shakespeareanized story of Ahab."[32][32] Melville 1993, 119.[33][33] Unfolding in the essay "Hawthorne and his Mosses," see the quote from Bezanson below.[34][34] Melville 1993, 122.[35] G. Thomas Tanselle, "Historical Note Section VI", in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press

and The Newberry Library, 1988, 660.[36][36] Melville already was indebted to them for almost $700 (Tanselle 1988, p. 660).[37][37] Cited by Tanselle 1988, 661.[38][38] Tanselle 1988, 662.[39][39] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 663.[40][40] Tanselle 1988, 663.[41][41] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 663-4.[42][42] Tanselle 1988, 665.[43][43] Tanselle 1988, 667.[44][44] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 664.[45][45] The next day he wrote about having received Melville's "packet yesterday from the Secretary of Legation." (Tanselle 1988, 680)[46][46] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 671.[47][47] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 672.[48][48] Tanselle 1988, 673.[49][49] Tanselle 1988, 683-4.[50][50] Tanselle 1988, 686-7.[51][51] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 673.[52][52] Tanselle 1988, 675-676.[53][53] Tanselle 1988, 678.[54][54] Melville's involvement with this arrangement is not clear: if it were a gesture of Bentley toward meeting Melville's wishes, as Tanselle

(1988, 678) suggests, its selection put an emphasis on the quotation Melville may not have agreed with.[55][55] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 679.[56][56] Tanselle 1988, 678-9.[57][57] Hershel Parker, "Historical Note Section VII," in Melville 1988, 702.[58][58] Cited in Parker 1988, 708.[59][59] G. Thomas Tanselle, "Note on the Text," in Melville 1988, 772.[60][60] Tanselle 1988, 789.[61][61] Cited in Tanselle 1988, 681 (citation), 784.[62][62] Tanselle 1988, 682, 784-5.[63][63] Tanselle 1988, 682, 785.[64][64] Tanselle 1988, 682, 785-7.[65] Melville, Herman. Correspondence, ed. by Lynn Horth. Evanston, IL and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry

Library (1993), 212. Paperback ISBN 0-8101-0995-6. Horth tentatively dates the letter November 17, 1851.[66] Correspondence, 212.[67] Correspondence, 212-213.[68] "A page from The Life and Works of Herman Melville" (http:/ / www. melville. org/ hmmoby. htm#Contemporary)[69] Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991: 354.

ISBN 0-87745-332-2.[70] Selby, Nick, author and editor. Herman Melville's, Moby-Dick (Columbia Critical Guides series). New York: Columbia University Press,

1999. pp. 51-52. ISBN 0-231-11538-5.[71][71] Selby, 53.

Moby-Dick 19

Editions• Melville, H. The Whale. London: Richard Bentley, 1851 3 vols. (viii, 312; iv, 303; iv, 328 pp.) Published October

18, 1851.• Melville, H., Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851. xxiii, 635 pages. Published

probably on November 14, 1851.• Melville, H., Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1930. In three large volumes, encased in a

metal slipcase and distinguished by the original, now iconographic woodblock print illustrations of RockwellKent. (read about and view them here. (http:/ / clubs. plattsburgh. edu/ museum/ mobydick3. htm))

• Melville, H., Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale. Garden City, New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1949.416 pages. Illustrated by Anton Otto Fischer.

• Melville, H. Moby-Dick, or The Whale. Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville 6.Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern U. Press, 1988. A critical text with appendices on the history and reception of thebook. The text is in the public domain.

• Melville, H. Moby-Dick, or The Whale (http:/ / www. arionpress. com/ catalog/ 006. htm) Arion Press, SanFrancisco, 1979, illustrated with 100 wood engravings by Barry Moser. Edition of 265, of which 250 were forsale. One of the most noted fine book editions of 20th century America, recognized by the Grolier Club as one ofthe 100 most beautiful books of the century.[1]

• Melville, H., Moby Dick; or The Whale. (http:/ / www. ucpress. edu/ books/ pages/ 1590. php) Berkeley, LosAngeles, and London, 1981. A reduced version of the Arion Press Edition with 100 illustrations by Barry Moser.

• Melville, H., Moby-Dick or The Whale., 2000, The Modern Library, New York, paper back, introduction byElizabeth Hardwick, with hundreds of illustrations by Rockwell Kent.

• Melville, H., Moby-Dick (http:/ / www. foliosociety. com/ book/ MBY/ moby-dick) The Folio Society 2009. ALimited Edition with 281 illustrations by Rockwell Kent.

•• Melville, H., "Moby Dick", 2011, Harper Perennial Classics,

Critical editions• Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Editions) (http:/ / books. wwnorton. com/ books/ detail. aspx?id=11008), Edited by

Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: W.W. Norton, 2nd ed. 2002. ISBN 978-0-393-97283-2.• Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition (http:/ / www. pearsonhighered. com/ educator/ product/

Moby-Dick-A-Longman-Critical-Edition/ 9780321228000. page), Edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer.New York: Longman, 2007 and 2009. ISBN 978-0-321-22800-0.

Footnotes[1] Bromer Booksellers - Highlights from Catalogue 127: An Extraordinary Gathering (http:/ / www. bromer. com/ cat127_highlights. html)

Sources• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. A Norton Critical Edition. Second Edition, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison

Hayford, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002, ISBN 9780393972832• G. Thomas Tanselle, "Historical Note Section VI" and "Note on the Text", in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. The

Writings of Herman Melville Volume Six, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and TheNewberry Library, 1988, ISBN 9780810102699

Moby-Dick 20

External links• Moby-Dick at Project Gutenberg• Lit to Go at http:/ / etc. usf. edu/ lit2go/ 42/ moby-dick• "Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World" (http:/ / www. pbs. org/ wgbh/ americanexperience/ films/

whaling/ ), PBS, American Experience, 2010. Cf. section on Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick.• "Did Melville Borrow the Idea for 'Moby Dick'?" (http:/ / www. npr. org/ templates/ story/ story.

php?storyId=5068747), Weekend Edition, NPR. A radio discussion with literary historian Paul Collins.

Article Sources and Contributors 21

Article Sources and ContributorsMoby-Dick  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=595883524  Contributors: 12345derpaderp12345, 12345durpadurp12345, 208.216.180.xxx, 21655, 23skidoo, 6afraidof7, 80.255,A Runyon, A. 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Image Sources, Licenses and ContributorsFile:Moby-Dick FE title page.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Moby-Dick_FE_title_page.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Original uploader was ChickBowen at en.wikipediaFile:The voyage of the Pequod.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:The_voyage_of_the_Pequod.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Everett Henry (1893–1961)File:Moby Dick p510 illustration.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Moby_Dick_p510_illustration.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: A. Burnham ShuteFile:Moby Dick final chase.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: I. W. TaberFile:Queequeg.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Queequeg.JPG  License: Public Domain  Contributors: I. W. TaberFile:Herman Melville.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Herman_Melville.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Joseph O. Eaton and an unknown etcher

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