It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points. Renee O'Connor plays Michelle Herman, a female counterpart of Ishmael in Moby Dick, a 2010 modern-day film adaptation in which Barry Bostwick plays Ahab. Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod makes the first of nine sea-encounters, or " gams", with other ships: Ahab hails the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into the sea before he can answer. The book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, in a single-volume edition in New York in November.

The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed. Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, Moby-Dick is language: "nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic and unceasingly allusive". Instead, they may be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues, a masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale". While Melville was simultaneously writing and proofreading what had been set, the corrected proof would be plated, that is, the type fixed in final form.Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), which may have given Melville the first thought for a whaling book, and in any case contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in Moby-Dick. Melville first proposed the British publication in a June 27, 1850, letter to Richard Bentley, London publisher of his earlier works. First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences - especially Shakespearean ones - on Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. He is left behind in the sea, and so is the only crewman of the Pequod to survive the final encounter. The Pequod 's next gam is with the French whaler Bouton de Rose, whose crew is ignorant of the ambergris in the gut of the diseased whale in their possession.

In August 1850, with the manuscript perhaps half finished, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and was deeply impressed by his Mosses from an Old Manse, which he compared to Shakespeare in its cosmic ambitions.Set over a metrical pattern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose", Bezanson suggests.

Each Ishmael, however, experiences a miraculous rescue; in the Bible from thirst, in the novel from drowning. You must read absolutely all of the last thirty chapters, which tell the story of what happens when Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod finally set their eyes on a rather angry Moby Dick. Ishmael wrestles with the realization that he cannot follow Ahab to a fiery doom but must be content with "attainable felicity," (Ch. Peleg describes Captain Ahab: "He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless "has his humanities".Nathalia Wright says that all Melville's heroes—with the exception of Benito Cereno and Billy Budd—are manifestations of the Biblical Ishmael, and four are actually identified with him: Redburn, Ishmael, Pierre, and Pitch from The Confidence-Man. The one surviving leaf of proof, "a 'trial' page bearing the title 'The Whale' and the Harper imprint," [145] shows that at this point, after the publisher had been found, the original title still stood.

In Chapter 89, " Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, Ishmael expounds the legal concept "fast-fish and loose-fish", which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship; he compares the concept to events in history, such as the European colonization of the Americas, the partitions of Poland, and the Mexican–American War. Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters [note 1] as structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered Moby Dick. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. Chapter clusters are the chapters on the significance of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire.Days later, Pip, a little African American cabin-boy, jumps in panic from Stubb's whale boat and the whale must be cut loose because Pip is entangled in the line; a few days later Pip jumps in panic again, and is left alone in the sea and has gone insane by the time he is picked up. In the chapter "The Doubloon," Ishmael reports how each spectator sees his own personality reflected in the coin, but does not look at it himself. These acts of destruction are also ones of creation: they blended with Melville’s own experience aboard a whaler and gave him, in part, his story. Later critics distinguished Ishmael from Melville, and some saw his mystic and speculative consciousness as the novel's central force rather than Captain Ahab's monomaniacal force of will.