Five previously unknown men appear on deck and are revealed to be a special crew selected by Ahab and explain the shadowy figures seen boarding the ship.

American artist David Klamen has cited the novel as an important influence on his dark, slow-to-disclose paintings, noting a passage in the book in which a mysterious, undecipherable painting in a bar is gradually revealed to depict a whale.The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on Hamlet: "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself. The Transcendental socialist George Ripley published a review in the New York Tribune for November 22, in which he compared the book favorably to Mardi, because the "occasional touches of the subtle mysticism" was not carried on to excess but kept within boundaries by the solid realism of the whaling context. A few other reviewers, who did not comment upon the apparent impossibility of Ishmael telling the story, pointed out violations of narrative conventions in other passages.

He is left behind in the sea, and so is the only crewman of the Pequod to survive the final encounter. On October 18, the British edition, The Whale, was published in a printing of only 500 copies, [125] fewer than Melville's previous books. Big Blue, the whale god, visits the island and delivers his ‘sermons’, which are delivered by Byron Vos, a ‘whale talker’. According to Paul Giles, Sartor "furnished Melville with a prototype for his playful iconoclastic style in Moby-Dick", particularly in its narrative strategy and romantic ironic paradoxes. His quest to understand Big Blue and the mysterious Byron leads him to new friends and shared adventures.This is the second translation of Whale into English, and this translation presents an engaging, fantastical story of memory and place in an era when society changed and evolved from slow traditional ways to the ever-increasing fast pace of modern life.