The Whale

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In the case of Moby-Dick, Melville had taken almost a year longer than promised, and could not rely on Harpers to prepare the proofs as they had done for the earlier books. Byron was once a marine scientist but is now is set on an epic clean-up operation, which he hopes will revive the ocean after centuries of human greed and neglect.

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. The Morning Post found it "one of the cleverest, wittiest, and most amusing of modern books", and predicted that it was a book "which will do great things for the literary reputation of its author". Mocha Dick was rumored to have 20 or so harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity.The simplest sequences are of narrative progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters on whale painting, and sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". As he drew near, with his long curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the billows, we perceived that it was white as the surf around him; and the men stared aghast at each other, as they uttered, in a suppressed tone, the terrible name of MOCHA DICK! Buell sees a double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt". Browne's comment on "the [Sperm-Whale's] eyes but small, the pizell [penis] large, and prominent" [96] likely helped shape the comical chapter concerning whale penises, "The Cassock". Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to a yardarm opposite the sperm whale's head.

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. Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, was "a catalytic agent", one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces".Three weeks later, the typesetting was almost done, as he announced to Bentley on July 20: "I am now passing thro' the press, the closing sheets of my new work". Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse titled " Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in The Literary World on August 17 and 24. Although a successful earlier novel about Nantucket whalers had been written, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835) by Joseph C. 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. Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself?