Call Me Ishmael

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One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat—"its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg's sword chance"— Tashtego sights a sperm whale. At the end of May 1851, Melville delivered the bulk of his manuscript to Harper's for plating and printing of proof sheets. In the second gam off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho, a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a "judgment of God" is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale.

Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator. The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head; and the third mate is Flask, also from Martha's Vineyard, short, stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident of Nantucket. These acts of destruction are also ones of creation: they blended with Melville’s own experience aboard a whaler and gave him, in part, his story. Biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the reason for the change was that Harper's had two years earlier published a book with a similar title, The Whale and His Captors. Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters [note 1] as structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered Moby Dick.

On October 18, the British edition, The Whale, was published in a printing of only 500 copies, [125] fewer than Melville's previous books. Because the English edition omitted the epilogue describing Ishmael's escape, British reviewers read a book with a first-person narrator who apparently did not survive. Cheever's The Whale and His Captors (1850), was used for two episodes in Moby-Dick but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use. Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as a force of linearity and Ishmael a force of digression.

Other characteristic stylistic elements are the echoes and overtones, both imitation of distinct styles and habitual use of sources to shape his own work.This insight was then reinforced by the study of Melville's annotatations in his reading copy of Shakespeare, which show that he immersed himself in Shakespeare when he was preparing for Moby-Dick, especially King Lear and Macbeth.

Ishmael notes: "Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Only a couple of reviewers expressed themselves early enough not to be influenced by news of the British reception.In addition to cetological works, Melville also consulted scattered literary works that mention or discuss whales, as the opening "Extracts" section of the novel demonstrates. In the October 1851 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine "The Town Ho's Story" was published, with a footnote reading: "From 'The Whale'. A second level is the " poetic", such as in Ahab's quarter-deck monologue, to the point that it can be set as blank verse. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.