The Work
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was published in London by Richard Bentley in October 1851 and in New York by Harper and Brothers in November 1851. It was a commercial failure and a critical disappointment in its day - most reviewers found it too long, too philosophical, and too strange. The British edition, which omitted the Epilogue (apparently a compositor's error), led some reviewers to ask indignantly how Ishmael could have survived to tell the tale. The American edition, which restored the Epilogue, was marginally better received but still sold poorly.
The rehabilitation of Moby-Dick as a masterpiece occurred during the 'Melville revival' of the 1920s, beginning with Raymond Weaver's biography (1921) and continuing through the critical essays of Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and D.H. Lawrence. By the 1950s it had achieved its current status as the great American novel - the work that most completely embodies the ambition, violence, and theological anxiety of the American experiment.
The novel is approximately 210,000 words. It is narrated by Ishmael, the sole survivor of the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, whose captain, Ahab, is monomaniacally pursuing the white whale Moby Dick, who tore off Ahab's leg on a previous voyage. The hunt ends in the destruction of the ship and the death of all crew members except Ishmael.
Biblical Engagement
Jonah 1:3 ('But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord') is the text of Father Mapple's famous sermon in Chapter 9, generally considered the greatest set piece in the novel. Mapple's sermon is a work of theological art: it presents Jonah's flight from God's command, his storm, his confession ('I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven'), his voluntary sacrifice ('Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea'), and his restoration as the complete narrative of sin, judgment, grace, and commission. Mapple's application - 'Delight is to him who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven' - establishes the theological standard against which Ahab's rebellion will be measured.
Job 41:1 ('Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?') is God's rhetorical question to Job from the whirlwind, and it provides the theological context for Moby Dick as a symbol. The white whale is simultaneously a natural creature (Melville's detailed cetology chapters establish its biological reality with obsessive precision), a projection of Ahab's psychological obsession, and the Joban Leviathan - the representative of the divine inscrutability that resists all human attempts at comprehension and control. God's question to Job - 'Can you catch Leviathan?' - is answered in Moby-Dick: no, and the attempt destroys you.
1 Kings 21:25 ('But there was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord') is the biblical Ahab's characterization, and Melville's naming of his captain after the apostate king of Israel is deliberate. The biblical Ahab is the man who sold himself for wickedness - who murdered Naboth for his vineyard (1 Kings 21:1-19) and who followed the Baal worship of Jezebel. Melville's Ahab has made a comparable bargain: he has sold his soul to the pursuit of revenge against the white whale, and the voyage of the Pequod is the working out of that bargain.
Genesis 16:12 ('And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren') is the description of Ishmael, Hagar's son, the outcast whose name means 'God hears.' Melville's Ishmael - whose opening line 'Call me Ishmael' deliberately echoes the biblical Ishmael - is the outcast narrator who survives while all others are destroyed, the witness-survivor whose function is to tell the tale. His name connects him to the tradition of the outcast who is nonetheless heard by God.
Author and Context
Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York City to a merchant family that lost its prosperity in the financial panics of the 1830s. His father's death when Melville was twelve left the family in poverty. Melville went to sea in 1839 and spent several years as a sailor and then as a whaler, experiences that gave him the material for Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and eventually Moby-Dick. He wrote the novel in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1850-1851, in close proximity to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose influence on the novel - particularly its dark allegorical dimensions - was significant.
Melville's engagement with Christianity was profound and deeply ambivalent. He was raised in a devout Dutch Reformed household, lost his faith in young adulthood, and never recovered a conventional faith, though he was haunted by religious questions throughout his life. The dedication of Moby-Dick to Hawthorne - 'In Token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed' - reflects the influence of the man Melville called the one American writer capable of saying No in thunder.
Themes
The novel's central theological theme is the conflict between human will and divine inscrutability. Ahab's defiance - his declaration that he will 'strike through the mask' of apparent reality to whatever lies behind it - is a Promethean gesture that the novel simultaneously admires and condemns. His speech to the gold doubloon nailed to the mast, and his famous soliloquy to the white whale - 'I'd strike the sun if it insulted me' - are expressions of a heroic refusal of limitation that the narrative shows to be ultimately self-destructive.
The whale's whiteness is the novel's most sustained symbolic meditation. Melville devotes a chapter ('The Whiteness of the Whale') to the terrifying quality of white - simultaneously the color of purity and of the void, of the divine and of the abyss. The white whale is not simply evil; it may be divine, or it may be nothing at all, and the uncertainty between these possibilities is the source of its horror.
Reception
After its initial failure, the novel was progressively rehabilitated until it achieved its current canonical status. D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), and Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1947) were the most influential critical engagements that established the novel's status.
Legacy
The novel's influence on American literature and culture has been immeasurable. It established the template for the American epic novel - long, encyclopedic, philosophically ambitious, theologically serious. Its direct descendants include Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Father Mapple's sermon is one of the most frequently anthologized passages in American literature and is regularly used in homiletics courses as an example of narrative preaching.