Call Me Ishmael

Product Information

Bezanson also insists that it would be a mistake "to think the narrator indifferent to how his tale is told. Excluding the preliminaries and the one extract, the three volumes of the British edition came to 927 pages [128] and the single American volume to 635 pages. According to Milder, the cetological chapters cannot be leftovers from an earlier stage of composition and any theory that they are "will eventually founder on the stubborn meaningfulness of these chapters", because no scholar adhering to the theory has yet explained how these chapters "can bear intimate thematic relation to a symbolic story not yet conceived". The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns.

Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic storytelling when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift". Yet he saw as "the essential" in the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent" beneath the surface action and morality.That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Melville cannot do without savages, so he makes half of his dramatis personae wild Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities", who appeared in "an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric, outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive". The second mate, John Hall, is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member Henry Hubbard, who also is identified as the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage. Her "prophetic" fate is "a message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel Enderby, the Rachel, the Delight, and at last the Pequod".

By the end of the month, "wearied with the long delay of printers", Melville came back to finish work on the book in Pittsfield. In Moby-Dick, only Ishmael escapes the sinking of the Pequod, which is described as "that by a margin so narrow as to seem miraculous. Finally, Melville then read Thomas Browne's Religio Medici which Melville adored, describing Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel'".The British edition, set by Bentley's printers from the American page proofs with Melville's revisions and corrections, differs from the American edition in over 700 wordings and thousands of punctuation and spelling changes. An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. Moby-Dick contains large sections—most of them narrated by Ishmael—that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot, but describe aspects of the whaling business.