«Moby-Dick», Herman Melville135 chapters about a whale. He surfaces in chapter 133

So where is the whale?

The book is called Moby-Dick, and the White Whale himself surfaces in chapter 133 of 135, with 94% of the text behind you. Until then he lives only in other people’s stories. The word “whale” stands on its own 1,259 times, the name Moby Dick 77, and he is on stage for three chapters.

Captain Ahab takes his time too: he first stands on his quarter-deck in chapter 28. Before that, a young man who asks us to call him Ishmael spends a night at an inn, shares a bed with a tattooed cannibal harpooneer, and signs on to a whaler called the Pequod.

And then Melville tells you everything he knows about whales. In the chapter called “Cetology” he shelves them by size, like books: Folio, Octavo and Duodecimo, from the sperm whale down to the porpoise. It isn’t padding: the longer the whale stays away, the bigger he gets.

“Hast seen the White Whale?”

While the whale stays out of sight, the Pequod meets other ships, nine in the whole book. And at every meeting she wants to know one thing: has anyone seen the White Whale.

The answers climb like a ladder. The Goney’s captain drops his trumpet into the sea and never answers at all. The German on the Jungfrau has never heard of the whale and asks for lamp oil. The Bachelor’s captain has heard of him, but doesn’t believe in him. And the captain of the Samuel Enderby answers by holding up an arm of whale bone: he lost his own because of the whale.

The nearer the end, the nearer the whale. The Rachel saw him yesterday. The Delight points at a smashed boat and buries a sailor. The whale swims up to us through other people’s answers, and by chapter 133 you fear him as much as the crew does.

Gold on the mast

In chapter 36 Ahab nails a gold doubloon worth sixteen dollars to the mainmast: it goes to whoever first raises the White Whale. The crew cheers.

Sixty-odd chapters later, in chapter 99, everyone who passes the coin sees something of his own. Ahab sees himself. Stubb reads a horoscope off it. Flask does the sums: at two cents a cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. And little Pip just conjugates a verb: “I look, you look, he looks.”

Near the end Ahab has himself hoisted up the mast in a basket: “Ahab must have the doubloon!” And in chapter 133 he is the one who sees the whale first. Tashtego, the harpooneer, cries that he saw him the same instant, but Ahab won’t have it: “Fate reserved the doubloon for me.”

The coffin that floated

At the start of the book, at a crowded inn, Ishmael gets half a bed, and the other half goes to a harpooneer tattooed from head to foot. In the morning Ishmael wakes to find Queequeg’s arm thrown over him “in the most loving and affectionate manner”: you had almost thought, he says, he had been his wife. A few chapters later they are, in Queequeg’s phrase, married: bosom friends.

Near the end Queequeg falls ill, has a coffin made, and lies down in it to try it. Then he recovers: he has remembered a little duty ashore that he left undone, and changed his mind about dying. He keeps his clothes in the coffin and carves the patterns of his tattoos into the lid.

When the life-buoy sinks with a sailor who fell from the mast, the coffin is made into a new one. That is how it hangs at the Pequod’s stern through the last chapters. From the Delight, where they are burying their man, a voice shouts after her: you are showing us your coffin.

The ship he turned away

The eighth ship, the Rachel, saw the White Whale yesterday. In the chase a boat went missing, and in it the captain’s twelve-year-old son. Captain Gardiner, a Nantucketer Ahab knows, comes aboard the Pequod and begs: search with us for forty-eight hours, I will pay for it.

He reminds Ahab that he too has a boy, a small child safe at home. Ahab answers: “Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.” And orders the strangers warned off his deck in three minutes.

After three days of chase the Pequod goes down with all hands but Ishmael. Queequeg’s coffin keeps him afloat for almost a whole day and night, and on the second day a ship picks him up. It is the Rachel, still searching for her own.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the chase, though its three days are worth it, but for the waiting: for a hundred and thirty-two chapters the whale grows in other people’s answers, while Ahab hears less and less of what he is asked.

If it gets heavy, you can skim the chapters on how a whale’s head is built and how the blubber is boiled down: the plot won’t suffer. Just don’t skim the Rachel or the epilogue. One point off for the lectures on blubber. Though I like explaining how things work myself.