Life & Background
Melville was born in New York in 1819 into a prosperous merchant family that collapsed into bankruptcy and his father's death when he was twelve. He worked as a clerk, a schoolteacher, and a farmhand before shipping out on a whaler in 1841. He deserted in the Marquesas, lived among Polynesian islanders, joined an Australian whaler, took part in a mutiny, and returned via a US navy frigate. Typee and Omoo, drawn from these adventures, sold well; the increasingly ambitious books that followed did not. Moby-Dick in 1851 was a commercial and critical failure, and Pierre finished his reputation. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks and died in 1891 in obscurity, with Billy Budd unpublished in a drawer. The Melville revival of the 1920s made his reputation.
Moby-Dick
Ishmael, seeking escape from a damp and drizzly November in his soul, ships aboard the Pequod out of Nantucket, having first befriended the tattooed harpooneer Queequeg. The captain, Ahab, remains below for days before appearing on his ivory leg. He nails a gold doubloon to the mast and declares the voyage's true purpose: to hunt and kill the white whale that took his leg. The crew — Starbuck the reasoning first mate, Stubb, Flask, and harpooneers from four continents — are bound to the quest by ceremony. The narrative is interrupted throughout by chapters on cetology, whale anatomy, rope, the colour white, and the ethics of the hunt. After three days' chase the whale destroys the ship. Ishmael alone survives, afloat on Queequeg's coffin.
The novel refuses generic stability: it is sea narrative, encyclopaedia, sermon, Shakespearean tragedy in soliloquy and stage direction, and comic essay, and the shifts are the argument, since a book about a creature that cannot be classified must break the classifications it uses. The whale is deliberately unreadable — the chapter on the whiteness of the whale is a long meditation on a colour that signifies everything and therefore nothing — and every character projects a meaning onto it, Ahab's being monomaniacal. Readings run from the theological, with Ahab as a Promethean blasphemer, to the political, with the Pequod as an American ship of state and its multiracial crew driven by a charismatic tyrant, to the ecological and the queer, the last centring on Ishmael and Queequeg.
Why Melville Matters
Moby-Dick is the most formally ambitious American novel and the standard case study in reputational recovery: unread for seventy years, it became after the 1920s revival the central text of the American canon and of the American Renaissance as defined by F.O. Matthiessen. Bartleby, the Scrivener, whose clerk answers every request with a preference not to, is among the most analysed short stories in the language, and Billy Budd, published in 1924, is a permanent fixture in law-and-literature study.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Typee1846
- Mardi1849
- Moby-Dick1851
- Pierre1852
- Bartleby, the Scrivener1853
- Benito Cereno1855
- The Confidence-Man1857
- Billy Budd1924