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Moby-Dick — the hyphen in the title is present in the original edition — is a novel by Herman Melville. It was first published by Richard Bentley in expurgated form (in three volumes) as The Whale in London on 18 October 1851, and then in full, by Harper and Brothers, as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in New York on 14 November 1851, in a single volume. Moby-Dick's style was revolutionary for its time: descriptions in intricate, imaginative, and varied prose of the methods of whale-hunting, the adventure, and the narrator's reflections interweave the story's themes with a huge swath of Western literature, history, religion, mythology, philosophy, and science. Although its initial reception was unfavorable, Moby-Dick is now considered to be one of the canonical novels in the English language, and has secured Melville's reputation in the first rank of American writers. The novel is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Uniquely, the titles of many of the chapters listed in the table of contents differ slightly from the corresponding chapter-titles as they appear in the text.

An overwhelming feature of this novel is that huge chunks — probably over half the text — do not advance the plot at all, but rather are non-fiction digressions on (among other things) whales, whaling, the color white, and the "crotch" (forked support holding the harpoon in a whale boat).

Background

The plot was inspired in part by the November 20, 1820, sinking of the whaleship Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts). The ship went down 2,000 miles (3,700 km) from the western coast of South America after it was attacked by an 80-ton Sperm Whale. The story was recounted by several of the eight survivors, including first mate Owen Chase in his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Moby-Dick also undoubtedly draws on Melville's experiences as a sailor, and in particular on his voyage on the whaler Acushnet in 1841–1842. Melville left no other account of his career as a whaler, so we can only guess as to the extent to which Moby-Dick is a roman à clef (like his previous novels Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket), and how much is wholly invented. However, it is known that there was a real-life albino sperm whale, known as Mocha Dick, that lived near the island of Mocha off Chile's southern coast, several decades before Melville wrote his book. Mocha Dick, like Moby Dick in Melville's story, had escaped countless times from the attacks of whalers, whom he would often attack with premeditated ferocity, and consequently had dozens of harpoons in his back. Mocha Dick was eventually killed in the 1830s. No one knows what prompted Melville to change the name "Mocha" to "Moby", but given that Mocha Dick was an albino sperm whale, it seems highly probable that Melville used him as a basis for his book.

Characters

The crew-members of the Pequod are carefully drawn stylizations of human types and habits; critics have often described them as a "self-enclosed universe".

Ishmael

Ishmael is the name the narrator takes for himself, it is unclear whether or not this is his actual name. "Call me Ishmael" is one of the best-known opening sentences in English language literature. A newcomer to whaling, Ishmael serves as our eyes and ears aboard the Pequod. He is, at the end, the only witness alive to tell the tale. Ishmael was the name of the first son of Abraham in the Old Testament. The Biblical Ishmael was born to a slave woman because Abraham believed his wife, Sarah, to be infertile; when God granted her a son, named Isaac, Ishmael and his mother were turned out of Abraham's household. The name has come to symbolize orphans and social outcasts. From the beginning, Ishmael tells us that he turns to the sea out of a sense of alienation from human society. Ishmael, like Melville, has a rich literary background that he brings to bear on his shipmates and their adventure.

Ishmael resembles Melville himself in many ways, as well as the narrator of Melville's White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War. All are literary, reflective types who see their shipmates as exemplars of human nature and the universe, and tell their stories with a wealth of philosophical reflection. Ishmael himself sometimes completely vanishes into Moby Dick: toward the end of the novel it can be easy to forget that it is being told by a first-person narrator and not simply an omniscient narrator. In many ways the Pequod is a ship of outcasts that manage to form a complete society among themselves. Ishmael is perhaps its voice, or its self-consciousness.

Ahab

Ahab is the captain of the whaling ship Pequod. Having lost a leg to Moby Dick on their last meeting, Captain Ahab is consumed with the desire for revenge. He has a peg leg made of whalebone, and a livid white scar that runs from head to toe and looks like the mark which a bolt of lightning leaves in the bark of a tree. Contrary to what many readers believe, the scar down Ahab's side was not given to him by Moby Dick, it was actually caused by a lightning strike ("clear spirit of clear fire", see Chapter 119). There are two Ahabs named in the Bible, one a King of Israel, the other a blasphemous prophet delivered by God to be killed by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. The captain is named after the king, who is described in the novel as "bloodthirsty".

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