One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat—"its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg's sword chance"— Tashtego sights a sperm whale. 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. Considering his elaborate use of sources, "it is safe to say" that they helped him shape the narrative, its plot included.

Changing the title was not a problem for the American edition, since the running heads throughout the book only showed the titles of the chapters, and the title page, which would include the publisher's name, could not be printed until a publisher was found. At the end of May 1851, Melville delivered the bulk of his manuscript to Harper's for plating and printing of proof sheets. The second mate, John Hall, is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member Henry Hubbard, who also is identified as the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage. The British edition, set by Bentley's printers from the American page proofs with Melville's revisions and corrections, differs from the American edition in over 700 wordings and thousands of punctuation and spelling changes. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature.Melville attended a service there shortly before he shipped out on the Acushnet, and he heard a sermon by Reverend Enoch Mudge, who is at least in part the inspiration for Father Mapple. 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. I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when God forbids it, 'tis positivley said, the plants of the field were not yet growne. Each Ishmael, however, experiences a miraculous rescue; in the Bible from thirst, in the novel from drowning. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads".

A little higher up the screen, “atcDave” poses the question of what would actually be the greatest novel ever written. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God. The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of the title for the New York edition. Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed cannibal Polynesian Queequeg, a harpooneer whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko.They thought that they had probably read it, but asked me if I could be a little bit more precise about its title. Vincent, the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings. The next chapter ("Brit"), thus the other half of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live whales, and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied, more or less from front to rear and from outer to inner parts, all the way down to the skeleton.