The Whale

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John Bull praised the author for making literature out of unlikely and even unattractive matter, and the Morning Post found that delight far outstripped the improbable character of events. In the second gam off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho, a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a "judgment of God" is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale. Ishmael explains that because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sails on without the customary "gam", which Ishmael defines as a "social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships", in which the two captains remain on one ship and the chief mates on the other. In the second installment, Duyckinck described Moby-Dick as three books rolled into one: he was pleased with the book as far as it was a thorough account of the sperm whale, less so with it as far as the adventures of the Pequod crew were considered, perceiving the characters as unrealistic and expressing inappropriate opinions on religions, and condemned the essayistic rhapsodizing and moralizing with what he thought was little respect of what "must be to the world the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced.

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. An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. 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. Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse titled " Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in The Literary World on August 17 and 24.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.

Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry. 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. In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that Shakespeare's "unapproachability" is nonsense for an American. Melville also borrowed stylistic qualities from Renaissance Humanists such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. This scene, Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad observes, "reprises a moment in the second chapter of Moby-Dick", where Ishmael wanders around New Bedford looking for a place to spend the night, and momentarily joins a congregation: "It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.Porter praised the book, and all of Melville's five earlier works, as the writings "of a man who is at once philosopher, painter, and poet".