[4] Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable,[5] though some objected that the tale seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship, as the British edition lacked the epilogue recounting Ishmael's survival.

Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod makes the first of nine sea-encounters, or "gams", with other ships: Ahab hails the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into the sea before he can answer.

The crew spends time processing various harvested whale parts — liquifying congealed spermaceti, boiling blubber, decanting warm oil into casks, stowing them in cargo, and scrubbing the decks.

In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada".

Instead, they may be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues, a masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale".

Melville stretches grammar, quotes well-known or obscure sources, or swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism.

[38] For Arvin, the essence of the writing style of Moby-Dick lies in the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's style—so that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half unreal one—this is the prime characteristic of his language.

Examples of this are "the consistently excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as in the way he encourages the rowing crew in a rhythm of speech that suggests "the beat of the oars takes the place of the metronomic meter".

The fourth and final level of rhetoric is the composite, "a magnificent blending" of the first three and possible other elements: The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.

With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

[53]Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gave Moby-Dick "a kind of diction that depended upon no source",[54] and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life".

William Engel notes that Melville had Burton's book at his side, and says "this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice.

"[71] Additionally, Hershel Parker writes that in 1847, Anatomy of Melancholy served as Melville's "sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and in the following year he bought a set of Michel de Montaigne's works.

Although a successful earlier novel about Nantucket whalers had been written, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835) by Joseph C. Hart,[87] which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny.

[97] Reasoning from biographical evidence, analysis of the functions of characters, and a series of unexplained but perhaps meaningful inconsistencies in the final version, they hypothesize that reading Shakespeare and his new friendship with Hawthorne, in the words of Lawrence Buell, inspired Melville to rewrite a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure into "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions".

[98] The earliest surviving mention of what became Moby-Dick is a letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana Jr. on May 1, 1850:[99] About the "whaling voyage"—I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine.

[102] Scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer cite the development of the character Ishmael as another factor which prolonged Melville's process of composition and which can be deduced from the structure of the final version of the book.

[103] Less than two months after mentioning the project to Dana, Melville reported in a letter of June 27 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 you now to propose its publication in England.

"[110] Buell finds the evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing", since the impact of Shakespeare and Hawthorne was "surely monumental",[98] but others challenge the theories of the composition in three ways.

"[134] The British publisher hired one or more revisers who were, in the evaluation of scholar Steven Olsen-Smith, responsible for "unauthorized changes ranging from typographical errors and omissions to acts of outright censorship".

[153] Melville himself never saw these reviews, and Parker calls it a "bitter irony" that the reception overseas was "all he could possibly have hoped for, short of a few conspicuous proclamations that the distance between him and Shakespeare was by no means immeasurable.

The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.According to the London Literary Gazette and Journal of Science and Art for December 6, 1851, "Mr. 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".

[163] The most influential American review, ranked according to the number of references to it, appeared in the weekly magazine Literary World, which had printed Melville's "Mosses" essay the preceding year.

[164] The first half of the first installment was devoted to an event of remarkable coincidence: early in the month, between the publishing of the British and the American edition, a whale had sunk the New Bedford whaler Ann Alexander near Chile.

[168]The Transcendental socialist George Ripley published a review in the New York Tribune for November 22, in which he compared the book favorably to Mardi, because the "occasional touches of the subtle mysticism" was not carried on to excess but kept within boundaries by the solid realism of the whaling context.

[169] Ripley was almost surely also the author of the review in Harper's for December, which saw in Ahab's quest the "slight framework" for something else: "Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life.

A friend of Duyckinck's, William Allen Butler, protested in the National Intelligencer against "the querulous and cavilling innuendoes" and the "irreverent wit," while the Boston Post called it "a crazy sort of affair.

[178] The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination."

According to Rampersad, it was Melville who "empowered Ellison to insist on a place in the American literary tradition" by his example of "representing the complexity of race and racism so acutely and generously in his text".

[183][184][185] According to critic Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae, a book with the whiteness or blankness of nonmeaning as its main symbol should logically propose a depersonalized view of nature, but in this respect the novel is "amazingly inconsistent", as Melville "elevates the masculine principle above the feminine.