At the chapter’s end there is the vision of the “grand hooded phantom” in language that combines magnificence and foreboding.

The information about whaling and whales is interesting in itself, but also vital to the fiction because it anchors in reality things that would otherwise look even more strange than they do. If one thinks of the bare-bones plot, there are things hard to believe. Despite Ahab’s force of character, it seems unlikely that he could retain the crew’s loyalty, deranged as he is. Except for him and his mysterious boat crew, everyone on board has signed on for the money to be made, about which Ahab cares nothing. But as with Ahab, Melville’s quarry is much larger than life: Every allusion to Moby Dick heightens the whale’s status to that of a nature-god, who does not so much swim in water as in myth. Seen this way, the novel concerns a crazy man who tries to kill a legend.

Melville lends credence to these improbabilities by embedding them in a world of detail. The central part of the novel is in large measure given over to the technical aspects of whaling—the equipment, the anatomy of the whales, the procedures of the hunt. Chapters LV to LVII show how whales have been portrayed, and from there to chapter CV we are told most of what we need to know. During this section we are only intermittently brought back to the movement of the plot for which the book’s first third sets the scene, and which, in the final chapters, drives toward the disaster. And just as the unlikely is given reality by what is on this ship the mundane, so in turn the frequently heightened language in which the ordinary is portrayed casts a glow that often makes common life seem astonishing. The novel’s action takes place in a realm that is not quite ours but that is not entirely alien.

One of the major sources of the book’s vitality is this vividness about the ordinary. Melville brings everything to life—not only the human characters and the creatures of the sea, but also the sea itself and the Pequod upon it. Such passages operate on us like animism, giving life and energy to inanimate things such that the whole world is charged with intention though we do not know to what end.

The Pequod has barely weighed anchor in Nantucket when the analogies turn it first into a warrior and then into the largest of land animals: “We found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows” (p. 137). A little later “with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity” (p. 158).

In thinking that color may not be inherent in visible objects, the narrator humanizes the macrocosm only to make it ill: “The palsied universe lies before us a leper” (p. 238), and in a bravura passage as the ship approaches the Cape of Good Hope,

the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time clung obstinately to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred . . .

. . . we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon (p. 280).

Here moral consciousness is given to all the ocean’s animals, if only to make them suffer, and the somber intensity of the language calls us back to the purpose of Ahab’s voyage, which is both noble and insane.

That in the passage’s final image neither ocean nor air offers safe haven points to a large difference of view about nature’s role among our nineteenth-century writers. Attitudes toward nature are often related to religious beliefs, and for Ralph Waldo Emerson, as usually for Henry Thoreau, nature is our secure home and the source of inspiration if our imaginations are open to it. Religious reformers and social commentators, both were New Englanders who had grown up in a landscape humanized by two centuries of settlement. They were concerned to make human life worthy of its natural surroundings, and these were in turn seen as informed by spiritual truth.

Writers of fiction were less confident about our home in nature. In the dark stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the physical world can give way at any moment, and in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, nature is benevolent or malign as a function of the psychology of the characters.