Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, dedicating it to Nathaniel Hawthorne, under whose influence much of the novel's darkness took shape. The narrator introduces himself in the famous imperative "Call me Ishmael," then signs onto the Pequod, a Nantucket whaling ship commanded by the one-legged Captain Ahab. Only after the ship has left port does Ahab reveal the true purpose of the voyage: not commercial whaling but the pursuit of a specific sperm whale, Moby Dick, who severed his leg years earlier. Ishmael, Starbuck the first mate, and the polyglot crew, including the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg, become implicated in an obsession they did not choose and cannot redirect.
Melville structures the novel in a way that deliberately frustrates narrative momentum. Between the dramatic chapters of the whale hunt, he inserts long technical passages on cetology, rope-making, whale anatomy, and the mechanics of rendering blubber into oil. These chapters are not digressive, they build the material world of mid-nineteenth-century whaling with such specificity that Ahab's metaphysical fury stands in sharper relief against an industry of cold, practical violence. Ahab projects cosmic malice onto the whale, "I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it", but the novel consistently raises the possibility that the whale is simply a whale, and that the malice is Ahab's own. Starbuck's rational objections are the closest the book comes to moral argument, and they fail completely.
The novel's central problem, how a charismatic, intelligent leader convinces rational people to follow a course they privately recognize as catastrophic, has never stopped being relevant. Starbuck knows the voyage is wrong. He considers killing Ahab while the captain sleeps. He does nothing. The logic of hierarchy, and the human tendency to defer to certainty even when its source is clearly unhinged, drives the ship toward the ending Melville signals from the first paragraph. Beyond its allegorical dimensions, the book is also one of the strangest literary structures in American fiction, part adventure novel, part encyclopedia, part Shakespearean tragedy staged on salt water, full of passages that read like nothing written before or after them.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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