The simplest is "a relatively straightforward expository style", such as in the cetological chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and serve chiefly as transitions" between more sophisticated levels. Ishmael, in the early chapters, is simply the narrator, just as the narrators in Melville's earlier sea adventures had been, but in later chapters becomes a mystical stage manager who is central to the tragedy. This prophecy was fulfilled when Ishmael, perishing in the desert, was saved by a miracle: the sudden appearance of a well of water.

The earliest surviving mention of what became Moby-Dick is a letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana Jr. The final phrase fuses the two halves of the comparison; the men become identical with the ship, which follows Ahab's direction. Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself? Biblical Ishmael is banished to "the wilderness of Beer-sheba", while the narrator of Moby-Dick wanders, in his own words, in "the wilderness of waters. In his book-length essay, Olson, who is primarily known as a poet, became one of the first Melvilleans to claim that there were two Moby-Dicks: one written before its author’s close, intensive reading of Shakespeare (in particular Macbeth and King Lear), and one after.This procedure was intended to provide the best (though still uncertain) claim for the UK copyright of an American work.

Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings, coincidings, and leewardings.The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head; and the third mate is Flask, also from Martha's Vineyard, short, stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident of Nantucket. 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. Earlier critics charged that Melville did not pay a great deal of attention to point of view, "and of course this is true" in Henry James's sense of the technique, yet Ishmael-narrator's "struggle" with the shaping of his narrative, "under constant discussion, is itself one of the major themes of the book. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage.

By the end of the month, "wearied with the long delay of printers", Melville came back to finish work on the book in Pittsfield. In Moby-Dick, only Ishmael escapes the sinking of the Pequod, which is described as "that by a margin so narrow as to seem miraculous. Olson blends Ishmael’s inquisitiveness with the obsessiveness of Ahab, and in this book he is, gloriously, riding his own space. Ishmael, like Melville, first worked as a school teacher before securing a position on a merchant vessel.The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns. Buell finds the evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing", since the impact of Shakespeare and Hawthorne was "surely monumental", [98] but others challenge the theories of the composition in three ways. In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". Fifty chapters later, Pip suffers mental disintegration after he is reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale.

O. Matthiessen complained as early as 1941 that "most of the criticism of our past masters has been perfunctorily tacked onto biographies" and objected to the "modern fallacy" of the "direct reading of an author's personal life into his works. The earliest American review, in the Boston Post for November 20, quoted the London Athenaeum 's scornful review, not realizing that some of the criticism of The Whale did not pertain to Moby-Dick. The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick, in the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. mastering his emotion, Starbuck calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said to Ahab: “Let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.Perceived grammatical or stylistic anomalies were treated with "a highly conservative interpretation of rules of 'correctness '". Browne's statement "I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an ob altitudo" [67] mirrors both in ethos and poetics Ishmael's "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. The largest of Melville's revisions is the addition to the British edition of a 139-word footnote in Chapter 87 explaining the word "gally". A second level is the " poetic", such as in Ahab's quarter-deck monologue, to the point that it can be set as blank verse.