Three words. No American novel has ever opened better and it is unlikely one ever will. The narrator does not say: My name is Ishmael. He says: Call me Ishmael. This is a handshake. This is also, pointedly, not a full disclosure. The name Ishmael in the Hebrew Bible is the name of the son Abraham had by Hagar the slave-woman, sent out into the desert with his mother, a child of wandering, a child not fully of the inheritance. The narrator is giving us a name to use that is at least as much a role as an identity.

He is in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in December. He is, he tells us, sometime between young and middle-aged. He has no money. He has grown, each year, more drawn each November to standing on Manhattan wharves looking at ships. He has, he tells us, begun to notice in himself a pull toward hats — he wants to knock them off of people — and a pull toward graveyards, and a pull toward a kind of grim civic anger. This, he explains with a Melville-size grin, is the sign for him that it is high time to go to sea.

He gives us, in six pages, the whole pull of the voyage to come. He gives us the idea of the ocean as the thing every landsman looks at — he points out that every American east of the Ohio wants to stand near water, and that city people will walk three blocks out of their way at lunch to reach a harbour rail. He gives us the idea that the whale itself is a kind of reservoir for human thought, a great alphabet of the dread and the beautiful, and that every man who goes aboard a whaler goes aboard his own mind.

This is the book already. Moby-Dick will be, by turns, a practical manual on the nineteenth-century whaling industry, a theatrical pentad of soliloquies from a stage every Shakespearean would recognize, a natural history of a disputed species, and a religious argument between a narrator who is not sure what he believes and a captain who is very sure. And every register it sets up, it sets up in the first chapter. Ishmael is capable of all of them. He can sound like a newspaper column and he can sound like a sermon and he can sound like a comic barker in a New Bedford boarding-house, and he will move from one register to another without warning.

By the end of chapter one Ishmael is on the road to Nantucket. He is going to sign, as a common sailor, on a whaler bound for a voyage that may last four years. He has no premonition of catastrophe. He has only the familiar pull of the November. The captain of the ship he will sign onto is currently standing in a cabin a hundred miles away with a whalebone leg and a grudge, and Ishmael is already, in some deep sense, signed.

Ishmael arrives at New Bedford too late at night to find a good inn. The Spouter-Inn is the cheap one. The landlord, Peter Coffin — Melville's names are never accidental — tells him he will have to share a bed. The other lodger, says the landlord with an odd smile, is out selling a shrunken head.

Ishmael, appalled, waits up. The other lodger comes in after midnight. He is enormous. He is tattooed from forehead to feet. He has a shaven scalp with one lock of hair at the top. He is a South Pacific islander — Queequeg — the son of a king, a harpooner by profession. He does not speak much English. He carries a tomahawk-pipe. He prays to a small wooden idol before bed. And when Ishmael, in a panic, tries to bolt out of the shared bed, Queequeg — who has been very patient for a man surprised by a screaming white stranger in his bedroom — calmly offers him the bed and says he will sleep on the floor.

Ishmael reconsiders. He gets back into the bed. He delivers the line in this scene's epigraph: better a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. He sleeps. In the morning he wakes to find Queequeg's arm around him in the affectionate way a man would put an arm around his wife. It is the first and one of the warmest images of love in the novel.

They become friends. They become, in the book's language — which uses the word without irony — a married couple. They pool their money. They swear to look after each other. They board the ship as a pair. Queequeg will save Ishmael's life twice in the book, once by physical strength and once by the hollow wooden coffin he orders built for himself when he thinks he is dying, and which, after he recovers, becomes the ship's emergency lifebuoy, and which, at the end of the book, will be the only thing floating on the wreck of the Pequod for Ishmael to climb onto.

The whole moral structure of the novel sits in this little New Bedford chapter. America has sent out on the ship a crew of men from every race and religion on earth — a Gay Head Indian harpooner, an African harpooner, a Polynesian harpooner, a Persian cook, a Pequot sailor, a Nantucket Quaker captain — and Melville is not quite kidding when he calls the ship the Pequod, after an exterminated New England tribe. The ship is an image of the American project at its most generous: an impossible democracy of specialists, held together by a shared labour and a single meal at the same mess. It is also, Melville is telling us, a ship commanded by a Puritan madman in search of a single fish. A good ship, in other words, run by a bad idea.

The Pequod has been at sea for weeks. Captain Ahab — tall, lame on one whale-bone leg, grim, silent — has kept mostly to his cabin. The first mate Starbuck has been quietly running the ship. The crew, which signed on for an ordinary whaling voyage, has been doing ordinary whaling work.

One afternoon the captain walks the length of the quarterdeck, back and forth, back and forth, while the mates stand watchful at the rail. He stops. He calls all hands on deck. The crew crowds aft. Ahab reaches into his pocket and produces a Spanish gold doubloon — a real coin, heavy, flashing in the sun — and with his own hand nails it to the mainmast.

And he makes them the speech. The gold is for the first man to sight a certain whale. A white-headed whale. A wrinkled brow. A crooked jaw. Three holes in the starboard fluke. The whale that took his leg, on his last voyage, off the coast of Japan. The crew, energized, shouts. Starbuck — alone of all the crew, not shouting — watches. He is a sober Nantucket Quaker. He had signed onto an ordinary voyage. He now realizes that the voyage he is on is not ordinary. He objects. He says — and Melville writes Starbuck as the one sane conscience in the book — that a captain cannot use a ship's crew, a ship's owners' money, and a ship's owners' ship, to pursue a private grudge against a fish. The money is the shareholders'. The whale bears him no malice. It was a dumb animal acting from instinct.

Ahab, in the speech that makes him a figure on the scale of Macbeth, answers. He says: all visible objects are but pasteboard masks, and behind every mask some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of its features. The white whale is that mask for him. Whether or not the whale is itself malignant, the thing behind the whale is. He will strike through the mask. He will strike through. If the sun insulted me, he says, I would strike it.

The speech is the turning of the book. The reader now understands, with Starbuck, that this is not a whaling voyage in the ordinary sense. The reader also understands that Ahab will not be dissuaded. Starbuck backs down. The crew is cheering. The gold is nailed. The ship will sail, for the next four hundred pages, toward a rendezvous Ahab has already set on a calendar no one else can see.

Melville is doing, in 1851, what few American writers had yet dared. He is writing a villain who is the captain of the ship and the protagonist of the book. He is writing, on American pages, a figure of monomania. Ahab is not a man broken by a whale. Ahab is a man who has decided to be broken by a whale and is willing to take a ship of thirty men down with him to prove the point.

Melville stops the story, and stops it at the best moment to stop it, for what is the most famous essay inside a novel in American literature. Ishmael steps forward. He admits that the reader has been wondering, for six chapters, why Ahab's obsession has such a grip. The mate Starbuck, the reader, the ordinary imagination — all of them can see a captain obsessed by a whale. None of them yet quite understand why this particular whale. Ishmael says he will try to explain.

What he then does is unlike anything else in the book. He delivers a thirty-page cultural, psychological, and religious essay on the colour white. He gives us a litany. White in royalty — the white robes of kings. White in sacrifice — the white of Greek marble, of Bengali Brahmins, of Christian lambs, of Easter brides. White as the colour of mourning in many cultures. White in terror — the white of sharks, of polar bears, of icebergs, of pallor on a dying face, of the albino, of snow-blindness, of a death shroud. White as the colour that is the combination of all colours and therefore the colour that is no colour, and therefore — Ishmael argues — the most frightening colour of all.

This is not, strictly, an essay about whales. It is an essay about the ground of being. Melville is arguing that the reason Ahab's whale is a specifically terrible whale is not that it is large, or old, or has killed men. It is that it is white. A black whale, Ishmael says — even a great vicious black whale — could be hated in an ordinary way. A white whale cannot. A white whale is a blank piece of paper on which the human mind writes every horror it has ever invented and then finds, in its own handwriting, the blankness underneath.

The chapter is the book's philosophical spine. Every theological argument in Moby-Dick bends around it. Ahab's conviction that there is a reasoning malignity behind the mask of the whale is one answer to the blankness. Starbuck's calm Christian confidence that the universe is ordered and merciful is another. Ishmael — who is the narrator and also, usefully, the only man on the Pequod who survives — takes neither side. He watches both of them. He respects both of them. He notices that the universe does not care to be interpreted and keeps being white.

This is not the first or the last moment in the novel when Melville writes a chapter that has nothing to do with whales and everything to do with nineteenth-century New England's own religious crisis. But it is the one that most defines him. A novelist who can interrupt his own narrative for thirty pages on the colour white, and hold the reader not only without losing her but at increasing pressure, is a novelist doing something American literature had never before tried. Whitman would come soon. Dickinson was already sending poems to her friends. But this chapter, in 1851, was the largest single claim any American novelist had yet made about what a novel could afford to contain.

A whale has been killed and hoisted against the ship's side. The crew has cut it apart. The blubber has been cut into thick strips called blanket-pieces. And now, at night, the try-works are lit. The try-works are a pair of large cast-iron pots set in a brick furnace on the ship's deck. In them, the blubber is boiled down to oil, which is the object of the voyage — lamp-oil for American houses, oil for the lighthouses, oil for the machinery of an industrializing country. The fires are fed with the scraps of blubber from the previous boiling. The ship is burning the whale to render the whale, and it is burning at night for the light.

Ishmael is at the helm. The deck is lit red. Enormous shadows of the harpooners tending the pots move across the sails. The smoke is the smoke of a burning animal. The smell — Melville tells us — is not the smell of any land thing. The deck is hot. The whole ship, at 2 am in mid-Pacific, is a floating rendering-factory of a whale she killed six hours ago, and she is sailing, thus lit, into a darkness that the fire itself has made blacker.

And Ishmael, steering, gets drowsy. He has been at the helm an hour. He is watching the harpooners. He is watching the fire. He turns his back, for one second, to the compass and the ship's head. He wakes with a jolt and finds that he is disoriented — no stars in front of him, no stars behind him, no sense of which way he is pointing — and for a few horrifying moments he believes the ship is sailing backwards, keel-first, into chaos. He almost rights the wheel the wrong way. He almost puts the ship into a wind that would lay her on her beam-ends. He catches himself. He rights the ship. He wakes up fully.

And then Melville gives us one of the most extraordinary moral paragraphs in American prose. He tells us — through Ishmael — that the lesson is this: do not look too long at the fire. Do not steer by the flame of the try-works. The fire only shows the things nearest to it; the fire makes the darkness outside it blacker; and a man whose eyes have adjusted to the fire cannot see the stars any more. Turn, he tells us, to face the natural blaze of the sun. The sun is the book by which to steer. The fire on the deck is a local necessity. It will make you rich in oil. It will also, if you look at it too long, render you unable to steer at all.

This is not a chapter about whaling. This is the novel's central ethical warning. Ahab is a man who has been staring into the try-works for forty years. Everything outside the fire has gone black to him. He cannot see the stars. He is steering by a light that makes it impossible to see where he is going. And he is going, the book is telling us plainly, over the edge.

Pip is the ship's boy, a small Black Alabaman, gentle, musical, timid. He has been assigned, because the main crew is short, to replace an injured man as an oarsman in one of the whaleboats. He is not cut out for it. In his first whale chase he panics and jumps out of the boat. He is reprimanded. In the second chase he panics again and jumps out. The boat, with a whale on the line, cannot stop to pick him up. Stubb, the second mate, leaves him.

Pip is alone in the open Pacific. It is bright noon. He can see nothing but water and sky. He has a lifebelt. He bobs. For some forty minutes he bobs. The boat is far away. The ship is far away. There is no one, to any horizon, but himself and his own short legs treading water under him. Melville writes the scene as a small catastrophe of consciousness. Pip, who has had the ordinary eleven-year-old faith of an antebellum Black child in Alabama that the world is more or less a house with a ceiling, finds himself under an uncovered sky in an uncovered sea, and finds that the floor is not there, and that the ceiling is very high, and that neither is coming to his aid.

He is picked up. The Pequod, doubling back, finds him. He is handed up onto the deck. He is alive. He is wet. He is also, from that afternoon, different. He is not the same boy who was lowered in the boat. Melville tells us exactly what has happened. Pip's body survived. Pip's soul — the child in him that had believed the world was a house — drowned under him while his body floated. What comes back on board is a child body that has a different intelligence inside it. Pip is no longer merely a ship's boy. He is what the nineteenth century would politely have called a holy fool. He talks in fragments. He laughs at the wrong things. He sings songs the captain does not know. He has, Melville tells us carefully, seen the loom of the universe and seen what the weavers are weaving there. He is not quite with us in the ordinary sense anymore.

Ahab is the first person on the ship to notice. Ahab — who has been ignoring Pip like every other officer — suddenly takes the boy under his personal protection. Ahab brings Pip into his cabin. Ahab, who has not permitted any other human being near him in six hundred pages, sits with the boy and lets the boy talk. He calls him little kitten. He tells the crew that any man who harms the boy will answer to him.

This is the tenderest passage in the novel. And it is also, not accidentally, the most frightening. Ahab has recognized in the drowned and changed boy a version of his own condition — a soul that has been into the black water of the universe and has not quite come back. Ahab, the whole book has been telling us, is a man whose own soul drowned in some earlier storm and whose body has been walking the quarterdeck in its place for decades. The little kitten is a small mirror for him. He will love Pip. He will not, at the book's end, take him into the final whale-boat. He will leave him locked in the cabin. It is the one decent thing Ahab does in the book.

Three days of chase. Three separate encounters with the whale. On the first day Ahab's boat is smashed. On the second day three whaleboats are smashed and a harpooner is drowned. On the third day Ahab gets his shot. He throws his harpoon. The whale turns and comes straight at the ship.

Melville's last pages are the fastest in the book. The whale, hit by Ahab's harpoon, smashes head-on into the hull of the Pequod. The ship begins to sink. Ahab — still in his whaleboat, a hundred yards off — watches his ship go down. He shouts at the whale. He throws another harpoon. The line catches him around the neck. He is pulled out of the boat. He is gone.

The ship sinks. The sky watches. Ishmael, who had been in the stove whaleboat and had been flung clear, is clinging now to a plank. One by one the ship's spars pull under. The last thing above the water is the tip of a mast. A small bird — one of the sky-colored birds of the open Pacific — is trying to perch on the tip of the mast. The mast goes down. The bird is pulled down with it into the sinking. And then, with a sudden clean finality that is perhaps the best single sentence Melville ever wrote, the sea closes.

Ishmael is the only human being left. He is on the open water. Night comes. A coffin — the wooden coffin that Queequeg had ordered built months ago for his own death and had then recovered from, and which the ship's carpenter had converted into a lifebuoy — floats up through the closing vortex of the Pequod's wreck. Ishmael swims to it. He climbs on it. He drifts for a day and a half. He is picked up, on the second morning, by a passing whaleship, the Rachel, which is in the area looking for its own lost boat.

Melville ends with the Epilogue — a single page. The Rachel, he says, in seeking her missing children found only another orphan. Ishmael, as the narrator of the whole book, has been an orphan twice now: orphaned once by his childhood and orphaned again by a ship. He is the only man who can tell us what happened. The whole 600-page novel we have been reading is therefore what Ishmael has been writing, in the years since, from the salvaged coffin of his best friend.

Moby-Dick is a novel in which a captain destroys a ship to kill a whale. It is also — and this is why it matters more than any of the descriptions of whaling that make up its middle — a novel in which a friendship, quietly established in a boarding-house bed, turns out to be the one thing the sea cannot take. The ship is gone. The captain is gone. The whale is gone. Queequeg is gone. But Queequeg's coffin, built for his own death, has saved the narrator's life. A man who expected nothing of life has been saved by the kindness of a stranger with whom, one cold December night in New Bedford, he agreed to share a bed.