Herman Melville Moby Dick (1851)

A. Contextualize the text from a historical and cultural point of view.

Moby Dick or The Whale is a novel by Herman Melville, considered an outstanding
work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Although the novel was a commercial
failure and out of print at the time of the authors death in 1891, its reputation as a Great
American Novel grew during 20th century. William Faulkner said he wished he had written it
himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it one of the strongest and most wonderful books in the world
and the greatest book of the sea ever written. Call me Ishmael is one of the most famous
opening sentences.
The book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne whom he met in 1850 and inspired him.
Melville had long admired Hawthornes psychological depth and gothic grimness and associated
him with a new, distinctively American literature.
Moby Dick is based on Melvilles actual experience on a whaler. At the age of 21 he
boarded a ship called the Acushnet which took him on a whaling voyage around South Africa and
eventually ended up in the Marquesas Islands, 18 months after setting out from New York.
Melville had a companion but because he was lamed with a bag leg, he ended up alone, separated
by the tribe of cannibals in which they ran into. After one month in the company of the natives
along with other exotic experiences provided Melville with endless literary conceits.

B. Discuss the relevance of the text, in terms of content and style, with reference to its
authors literary canon
Moby Dick draws on Melvilles experience at sea, on his reading in whaling literature,
and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible (especially the Old Testament).
The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as
well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class
and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God. In addition to narrative prose,
Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry and catalogs to
Shakespearian stage directions, and soliloquies.

Ishmael narrates the monomaniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for
revenge on Moby dick, a white shale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahabs ship and
severed his leg at knee.
The novel is structured around the 2 main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are
intertwined and contrasted with each other. With Ishmael the observer and the narrator, the
structure is complex, comprising both narrative and non-narrative elements.
One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres: sermons, dreams,
travel accounts, autobiography, Elizabethan plays and epic poetry. Some even tried to divide the
book into acts but the chapters resisted this arrangement.
Regarding the novels style, an incomplete inventory of the language includes: nautical,
biblical, Homeric, Shakespearian, Miltonic (blank verse), cetological (marine mammal science),
alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic, allusive: Melville can stretch grammar, quote a range of
well-known or obscure sources, or swing from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition,
seamans slang, mystic speculations, or wild prophetic archaism.
Characteristic stylistic elements of another kind are the echoes and overtones because of
Melvilles imitations of certain distinct styles and his habitual use of sources to shape his own
work. His 3 most important sources are the Bible, Shakespeare, and John Milton. Most
importantly, through Shakespeare, Melville infused Moby Dick with a power of expression he
had not previously possessed: he went from limited reporting to the expression of profound
natural forces.
By the 1850s whaling was a dying industry. Whales had been hunted into near extinction
and substitutes for whaling oil had been found. Despite this range of cultural references and
affiliation with popular genres, Moby Dick was a failure. His reception led Melville to defy his
critics by writing in as increasingly experimental style and eventually forsaking novels in favor of
poetry.
Moby Dick remained largely ignored until the 1920s, when it was discovered and
promoted by literary historians interested in constructing an American literary tradition. For
them, Moby Dick was both a seminal work elaborating on classic American themes, such as
religion, fate and economic expansion, and radically experimental anachronism that anticipated
modernism in its outsized scope and pastiche forms.
It stands alongside James Joyces Ulysses and Sternes Tristam Shandy as a novel that
appears bizarre to the point of being unreadable but proves to be infinitely open to interpretation
and discovery.