YMMV / Moby-Dick

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • It was noted even at the time it was published that some of the symbolism and word choices were a bit suggestive, which Melville apparently didn't notice until later pointed out to him.
  • Moby Dick is a white sperm whale with a name synonymous with a slang term for the penis.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Captain Ahab — revenge-obsessed madman, a Tragic Hero, or both?
  • Fittingly, his nemesis. Moby Dick — normal, aggressive, oddly colored sperm whale, or supernatural Animalistic Abomination in the shape of one?
  • This becomes even more complicated when you account for the extreme intelligence of cetaceans and the fact that Moby Dick was inspired by the many documented cases of sperm whales that started hunting and destroying ships during the height of large-scale whaling. Whether he has any idea who Ahab specifically is may be questionable, but there's certainly a solid case for seeing Moby Dick as a Hero Antagonist seeking justified vengeance on the cruel otherworldly creatures murdering his kind on an industrial scale, with Ahab being the twisted personification of the entire enterprise.
• Awesome Moments:
  • After Peleg insults Queequeg, Ishmael jumps in to defend him, but Queequeg calmly pulls him back and shows just how skilled he is with a harpoon.
    Queequeg: Cap'n, ee see him small dark spot on water there? Ee see him? Well, s'pose him one whale eye! Well, den... (throws harpoon and hits the oil spot with a dead bulls-eye) Dat whale dead.
  • Queequeg's rescue of Tashtego, who has fallen into the oil reservoir of a dead whale's head, and his struggles and Daggoo's initial rescue attempt have knocked the head overboard into the sea. Queequeg grabs a knife, leaps overboard and swims after the sinking head, slicing a hole in the bottom and dragging the unconscious Tashtego out before he drowns. Ishmael's narration focuses hard on how utterly badass this is.
  • Ahab's death in the 1956 film:
    Ahab: (strapped to Moby Dick and stabbing him repeatedly with a harpoon) From Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee! THOU DAMNED WHALE!
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • The titular whale was seen upon the book's publication and for a long time afterwards as a nightmarish force of destruction. However, a combination of advances in marine biology and the rise of the environmentalist movement changed the perception of whales dramatically in the mid-20th century. This led to a reassessment of Moby-Dick, who is now more likely to be seen as an Unintentionally Sympathetic animal that justifiably resorts to lethal force against humans who want to kill him. Some, however, split the difference and see him as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • When the book was first released, Captain Ahab was derided by critics as an unrealistic character, with them scoffing at the idea that he could go so far and simply be obeyed. Following World War I, however, Ahab's destructive obsession and his crew going along with it resonated far more strongly. It's telling that today, multiple real people seen as letting their obsessions get the better of them with disastrous consequences have been compared to Ahab.
• Crazy Is Cool: Ahab. It is because of his insane obsession with Moby Dick that he created charts accurately mapping the annual movements of the whales, allowing them to follow the herd, kill as they go and fill their hold in record time. His insanity also wins over his crew and makes them all (save for Starbuck) extremely loyal and invested in the hunt for Moby Dick.
• Fair for Its Day:
  • To modern readers, the three harpooneers can come across as caricatures of Africans (Daggoo), Native Americans (Tashtego) and Polynesians (Queequeg), respectively. However, Melville makes them all sympathetic characters and Ishmael frequently talks about how they're similar to white men. In fact, he deliberately created them to defy stereotypes, with Tashtego being gloomy and fatalistic while Queequeg is cheerful and down-to-earth.
    "Better to sleep next to a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."
  • Through most of Moby-Dick, the sperm whale was a monster, the legendary leviathan to be hunted down and killed for its oil and spermaceti. Melville admonished people not to burn sperm-candles or lamp oil recklessly, not because he wished to spare the whales' lives, but because so many human sailors died every year on whaling expeditions. In the modern world, just about every species of whale is endangered, and whaling was one of the main reasons for their dangerously low numbers in the wild; "save the whales" is a rallying cry more people support than oppose and thus people are more likely now to cheer on Moby defending himself. Yet at the time the story was written, whale populations were much larger (to say nothing of the whaling ships being much less advanced) and nothing was known of whalesong or other such indicators of cetacean intelligence.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Ishmael doesn't believe whaling is a threat to the whale as a species since, unlike shooting buffalo, whaling was (at the time) dangerous, time-consuming, and it wasn't unknown for ships to spend months at sea only to come back empty handed. The book was published in 1851; the first practical harpoon cannon was invented in 1863. He also used the elephant surviving thousands of years of hunting as an example; much like whales, elephant populations have plummeted to endangered levels in the intervening years. Also, it's now understood that European elephants, mammoths, mastodons, and numerous other elephant species were driven extinct precisely because of human predation and habitat destruction over that time period, and the handful of declining species that are left are the only survivors.
• He's Just Hiding: Although Captain Gardiner's son is last seen being dragged to an uncertain fate by Moby-Dick and the last lines of the book suggest that his father's search for him came up empty, it's nice to hope that he might have somehow survived.
• Ho Yay:
  • The most egregious examples of this appear in the chapter called "A Squeeze of the Hand", which is about the delights of immersing one's hands in sperm whale oil and kneading it to keep it liquid.
    "Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."
  • Far, far more egregious are the detailed descriptions of Ishmael's and Queequeg's sleeping arrangements:
    Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.
  • Captain Ahab and Mr. Starbuck definitely have something going on, at least one-sidedly (on the part of Ahab). At one point, Ahab quite literally tells Starbuck he would prefer to gaze into his eyes than see the face of God (which sounds silly nowadays, but would have carried a huge amount of weight back when the book took place, as religion was essentially the be-all-end-all of most people's lives back then). This is clearly stated to not be a romantic thing. Ahab says that he is reminded of his family when he looks at Starbuck, because Starbuck has a wife and young son at home, just like Ahab.
    "I see my wife and child in thine eye… the far away home I see in that eye!"
  • Much of the aforementioned examples could be a subtle reflection of Herman Melville's love for Nathaniel Hawthorne, given Melville had wrote him love letters and even wrote dedication to him in his novel.
• It Was His Sled: The fact that the voyage is doomed and Ahab dies attempting to kill Moby-Dick is well-known even among people who haven't read/watched the story; so much so that comparing someone to Ahab has long become a byword for saying that their obsession is going to destroy them.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Moby was a whale. Everyone knows that. Not so many people have read the book.
• Memetic Mutation: "Moby's Dick" can be found in certain memes and webcomics, referring to the fact that a whale's penis can be 8-10 feet long.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Ahab dances along the edge of it for most of the story, but finally crosses it when, rather than help the Captain of the Rachel find his lost crew members – among them his own son – he chooses instead to pick up the trail of Moby Dick before it goes cold. In true Greek tragedy fashion, everything goes downhill fast after he makes this choice.
  • Stubb crosses it when he abandons Pip in the ocean, both so he could pick up on a fleeing whale's trail and because he was annoyed that Pip jumped out of the boat in fear of the whale.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Moby Dick himself. As stated many times across the Moby Dick pages on this very wiki, being a sperm whale he is naturally aggressive and will attack ships without provocation. He has sent who knows how many to their deaths and is treated by whalers as if he is some sort of demon, which probably makes him worse to those whose captains drag them after him. Moby Dick attacking without provocation: scary. Actually giving him a reason to attack you: scarier.
  • The 1998 certainly plays up the aggression more in the final hunt: the whale is seen eating the Pequod's crew alive, or otherwise goes out of his way to crush any of the hapless survivors with his tail.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Father Mapple in the film versions, as played by Orson Welles (1956), Gregory Peck (1998), and Donald Sutherland (2011).
  • Whaling captains Boomer and Gardiner only make one brief appearance apiece but their characterizations (a Foil to Ahab who also lost a limb to Moby-Dick and a man suffering from Realism-Induced Horror) cause both to be quite iconic. Neither of them is absolutely necessary for the story, but it's rare for an adaptation to exclude either of them.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis:
  • More people have heard of Captain Ahab than have heard of the Biblical King Ahab from which he got his name. As Captain Peleg points out early on, Ahab did not choose his name, and he shouldn't think too much about it.
  • Starbuck is better known as the name of the coffee franchise, or even the Battlestar Galactica character.
• Rooting for the Empire: In modern culture some people will be cheering Moby on as he kills everyone, no matter how sympathetic the crew is. At the time of writing, sperm whales were The Dreaded, believed to be highly aggressive by nature and thought to attack ships unprovoked. The situation has shifted, however, with the modern obsession with whales and their preservation, as well as the understanding that whales learned what types of ships were likely to hunt them and struck pre-emptively. Today some people don't see Moby Dick as a remorseless monster but as a self-defense mass murderer or even a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
• Signature Line:
  • The first one. "Call me Ishmael".
  • "From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!", to a much lesser extent.
• Special Effect Failure: The director and cinematographer of the 1956 film deliberately chose a dark look, to evoke old whaling prints. To the unsympathetic eye, it just looks underexposed.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Whether or not you approve of whaling, it is more controversial today than it was when Moby Dick was published, what with environmentalism and concern for endangered species.
  • The story does explicitly discuss whether Man could hunt whales to extinction. Already their numbers are diminishing, but the author's opinion is that they'll avoid Man by swimming North to the icy oceans, and so will always be able to evade extermination. It's an opinion based on flawed biology; given better science it could have gone the other way. Even so, Melville gives consideration to it.
  • The narration offers a defense of whaling by mentioning the benefits to humanity whale oil has had and also talks about how the whaling vessels allowed the liberation of the South American countries from Spanish imperial power, led to the successful colonisation of Australia, opened up the Polynesian islands to Europeans and forecasts whalers as being the cause for Japan to end its isolationism. To modern readers this can easily be read as the whaling industry being a figure to blame not only for the decline of cetaceans but also the suppression and decimation of tribal cultures and the resulting tragedy from Japan's rapid modernisation.
• Vindicated by History:
  • This work in particular took several decades to attain the critical status it enjoys today. Melville was previously a successful author of travel books that are forgotten today; after the failure of Moby Dick, his career declined. As a literary critic noted, he's probably the only writer in history to be ruined by his one masterpiece.
  • In the Reader's Digest: World's Best Reading edition, Thomas Fleming states in the Afterword that critics scoffed at the idea of someone going as far as Ahab did, and everyone around simply obeying… until they lived through World War I.
• The Woobie:
  • Starbuck. He's the only one in the Pequod's crew who understands how irrational and destructive Ahab's vendetta against Moby Dick is, when even the narrator starts falling under the captain's charismatic thrall. He pleads to Ahab several times to set aside his quest for vengeance for the sake of the crew and their families, pleas that fall under deaf ears. When he eventually finds an opportunity to kill Ahab and usurp command (a not entirely unreasonable action, given that Ahab's mania is endangering the crew's lives), Starbuck, despite himself, cannot go through with it, his sense of honor rendering him unable to mutiny, regardless of the positive outcome it could bring forth. By the end, all he can do is weep over his imminent death and not getting to see his family again.
  • Pip. Already the lowest on the pecking order of the Pequod's crew by virtue of being black in a time of entrenched racism as well as the youngest man on board, he's later forced to assume a substitute position on Stubb's whaling boat despite his inexperience and nerves. When he jumps out of the boat in fear of an approaching whale, Stubb callously abandons him to the ocean. He thus remains in the sea for hours before being picked up, by which point the isolation has driven him past the point of insanity. Pip's condition is so heart-wrenching that even Ahab, amidst his own madness, takes pity on the kid, empathizing and sharing a kinship based on their shared mania.
  • The captain of the Rachel. His son, among several other crew members, disappeared following an encounter with Moby Dick, wracking him with guilt and terror. When he desperately pleads for Ahab's aid in finding them, Ahab coldly refuses in preference of picking up the White Whale's trail – a decision which horrifies some of the Pequod's crew, including the usually indifferent Stubb.

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