The problem was that, at the time the book was written, around 1850-1851, there were no television documentaries. The novel has also been read as critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement Transcendentalism, attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist [32] Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. Join Ishmael as he forges unlikely friendships, confronts the girl of his dreams and survives a surprise cameo by Ringo Starr. The author of the unsigned review in two installments, on November 15 and 22, was later identified as publisher Evert Duyckinck.

Ahab has a static world view, blind to new information, but Ishmael's world view is constantly in flux as new insights and realizations occur.After several voyages in the merchant service, he decides to sail as a green hand on a whaling ship, leaving from Nantucket. These similes, with their astonishing "imaginative abundance," not only create dramatic movement, Matthiessen observes: "They are no less notable for breadth; and the more sustained among them, for an heroic dignity.

Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator.

Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic storytelling when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift". Although Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed possible cannibal, he soon decides "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. According to biographer Robertson-Lorant, the result was that the British edition was "badly mutilated". The coffin had previously been made by the ship's carpenter for Queequeg when the latter was suffering from a severe fever.

The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.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. He still had no American publisher, so the usual hurry about getting the British publication to precede the American was not present.