The only survivor is the novel’s narrator, Ishmael. His voice opens the work as he describes himself and how he became a member of the crew. In the Epilogue he floats in the water and is picked up by a ship.

The story line is slowed down and given variety by four other kinds of material: the “gams” or visits with other ships on the open ocean; extended similes that take us off the Pequod to scenes on land; allusions and references through which the narrator connects shipboard life to general culture; and cetology, information about whaling and whales so that we can understand the industry.

Structure

A long novel whose action is confined to a small ship might easily make a reader restless, and after the Pequod leaves the dock Melville heads off such narrative claustrophobia in a number of ways, the most obvious being the “gams,” the visits with other ships on the high seas. Each encounter provides a nautical world different from the Pequod’s, and several, like “The Town-Ho’s Story” (chap. LIV) go on at some length, keeping our attention elsewhere.

Second, Melville takes us off the ship by extended similes of the kind so frequent in The Iliad, in which action is similarly constricted to the patch of beach before Troy’s wall. In “Squid” (chap. LIX) “the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs” (p. 327). We are on dry land again for a moment with an image familiar in country life, and in “The Grand Armada” (chap. LXXXVII) we are secure in a lovely urban view: The spouts of massed whales “showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height” (p. 445). And after this moment of peace Melville at once continues with an evocation of danger and death analogous to what is happening in the scene.

As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid but still crescentic centre (p. 445).

All these similes take us off the Pequod’s deck and momentarily ventilate the closed-in scene of action on the ship.

By far, the most frequent means of widening the stage is the novel’s great allusiveness; the book is a magpie’s nest of information, and these references take us to many other people, ideas, and places in the world. It is hard to think of another work of fiction that so frequently makes overt use of history, geography, travel writing, literature, philosophy, religion, and the science of the day. And it is less remarkable that Melville acquired such wide knowledge than that his imagination could so readily call it up to enrich the narrative by similarities, precedents, analogies, contrasts, contradictions, and illustrations by anecdote.

Melville left school in his teens, but he was immensely intelligent, with curiosity to match, and he continued his education by having the run of libraries and through conversations with his friends. There can be an advantage in the self-education of a very intelligent person—originality is less likely to be rounded off and even dulled by the cultural consensus found in the schools. A number of our writers have had to educate themselves in large part—among others Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. The poet W. H. Auden remarked that a number of classic American authors wrote as though no one had done so before them, and while the comment has the panache of exaggeration, it points to a quirky freshness that has something to do with modest institutional training, a circumstance now rare when extended education is so common.

The largest body of material outside the plot, though intimately related to it, is the information about whales and whaling. In providing this, Melville of course relied on his own experience, but he also consulted the works of others who had written about the industry, and a good deal of this secondary reading found its way into the novel, usually without attribution. This was not plagiarism, of course; sources were bent to his own purposes, transformed into things the narrator now and then reports that he learned from others but more often presents as coming from his own long-standing knowledge. He is also occasionally given to satire about solemn erudition: The long riff in chapter XXXII, “Cetology,” about “Folio,” “Octavo,” and “Duodecimo” whales is a send-up of scientific classification systems as well as an explanation of real differences.

The book is organized as a recurring wave-like pattern of calm and tension. From the start a rhythm is established in which information about the scene or about the whaling alternates with something about the looming purpose of Ahab’s quest. The “Etymology” and “Extracts” preceding the narrative are both amusing and serious: On the one hand they are extravagant and arbitrary, and on the other they show humanity’s awe at the colossal scale of the whale’s presence.

The third Extract quotes the Bible about Jonah, who will be the central figure in “The Sermon” by Father Mapple (chap. IX). Jonah is also mentioned in the thirtieth Extract, which reports in a matter-of-fact way that a harpooner caught a whale “that was white all over” (p. 15). Melville begins to complicate that creature at the end of “Loomings” (chap. I), where Ishmael, in the “wonder-world” of his experience and in his “wild conceits,” sees a procession of whales “two and two,” evoking thoughts of both fertility and the destruction of the Flood.