Moby-Dick

Overview

Moby-Dick is six hundred and fifty pages and a hundred and thirty-five chapters, many of them two or three pages long. Melville published it in 1851, at thirty-two, having already written five successful books about the South Seas. It ruined him. Reviewers found it formless and blasphemous, the English edition appeared with the epilogue accidentally omitted so that reviewers complained the narrator of a first-person novel had drowned, and it sold a few thousand copies in his lifetime.

The thing to know before starting is that the whaling chapters are not padding. Roughly a third of the book is cetology: the classification of whales, the anatomy of the head, how the blubber is stripped, what ambergris is, the history of whales in painting, the line coiled in the boat that will take a man’s leg off if he puts it wrong. Readers who skip these are reading a much smaller book. They are doing two jobs: establishing that Melville knows a real trade in exhaustive detail, which makes the metaphysics unignorable, and demonstrating that a thing can be measured from every direction and remain unknown.

The other structural fact is that the book will not hold a form. Chapters appear as stage plays with speech headings and soliloquies, as sermons, as scientific papers, as a courtroom argument about property law. Melville was reading Shakespeare closely while writing, and Ahab speaks in a blank verse that keeps surfacing through the prose.

What happens

Ishmael, broke and depressed, goes to sea to keep himself from stepping into the street and knocking people’s hats off. In New Bedford he shares a bed at the Spouter-Inn with Queequeg, a tattooed harpooner from the South Pacific, and they become friends in one of the warmest sequences in American fiction. They hear Father Mapple preach on Jonah from a pulpit shaped like a ship’s bow, and sign aboard the Pequod at Nantucket.

The captain does not appear for weeks. When Ahab finally comes on deck he has a leg of polished whale bone and a scar running down his face and, it is hinted, his whole body. In the chapter called The Quarter-Deck he nails a gold doubloon to the mast and tells the crew what the voyage is really for: a white whale that took his leg. He gets them cheering, and Starbuck, the first mate, objects that vengeance on a dumb brute is blasphemous, and Ahab answers with the speech about pasteboard masks, that all visible things are a wall through which something looks out, and that a man must strike through it.

The voyage south and east is interrupted by the great set-piece chapters: the whiteness of the whale, which argues that white is the most terrifying colour because it suggests a blank; the mast-head, where a daydreaming lookout risks falling into the sea he has dissolved into; the try-works at night, the ship a floating furnace; the squeezing of spermaceti, where Ishmael finds himself squeezing his shipmates’ hands in the lumps and feeling an absurd universal love.

The Pequod meets nine other ships, and each gam is a variation on the theme. One captain has lost an arm to the same whale and has no intention of looking for it again. Another has a mad prophet aboard who warns them. The last, the Rachel, has lost a boat with the captain’s son in it and begs Ahab to help search, and Ahab refuses and sails on.

Ahab has smuggled aboard his own boat crew, led by a Parsee harpooner, Fedallah, who gives him prophecies in the manner of Macbeth’s witches: that Ahab will see two hearses on the sea, the second made of American wood, that Fedallah will die first and appear to him again, and that only hemp can kill him. Each comes true in a way he did not expect.

Starbuck stands outside Ahab’s cabin one night with a loaded musket, understanding that killing him would save thirty lives, and cannot do it. Ahab, in a late chapter called The Symphony, talks to Starbuck about his wife and child and forty years at sea, and comes as close to turning back as he ever will, and does not.

The chase takes three days. On the third the whale staves the ship. The line catches Ahab round the neck and takes him out of the boat. The Pequod goes down, and a hawk nailed to the mast by a last blow goes with it. Ishmael, thrown clear, floats for a day and a night on Queequeg’s coffin, and is picked up by the Rachel, still searching for her lost children.

How to read it

Do not skip the cetology. If you need permission to move faster, skim the chapters on whale portraiture and read every word of Chapter 42 on whiteness, Chapter 96 on the try-works and the account of the line.

Read the play chapters as plays. When Melville switches to stage directions and soliloquy he means you to hear Shakespeare, and Ahab’s speeches scan.

Watch Ishmael come and go. He is the narrator, and for long stretches he disappears entirely and the book reports scenes he cannot have witnessed. Melville does not explain, and the inconsistency is more interesting than a tidier book would be.

Keep track of Starbuck. He is the reasonable man throughout, he is right about everything, and he does nothing. The novel’s hardest question is why.

Read the first four chapters and Father Mapple’s sermon carefully. The sermon on Jonah is about a man running from a command, and it is placed at the front to be remembered at the end.

The common misreading is that the whale is a symbol of something identifiable. Melville spends a chapter arguing that its whiteness is terrible precisely because it suggests nothing, and different characters read the same doubloon on the mast in entirely different ways. The book is about people insisting on meaning, not about supplying one.

Questions it raises

• Is Ahab mad? He is lucid, organised, persuasive and a superb commander, and he has decided that a whale is an agent. Where exactly is the error?
• Starbuck sees the disaster coming and does not stop it. Is that cowardice, duty, decency, or the ordinary condition of people who work for someone?
• The whale is called white, blank, and terrible for its emptiness. Is the novel religious, anti-religious, or about the impossibility of telling?
• Why so much cetology? What is established by classifying an animal for two hundred pages that could not be said directly?
• Ahab claims he is acting under decree and also that his motives are sane. Can both be true, and does the book take a side?
• Ishmael alone survives, on a coffin, picked up by a ship looking for lost children. What is that ending doing?