Hart, [87] which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny, and Melville believed that no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in as fascinating or immediate a way as he had experienced it. As the Pequod approaches the Equator, Ahab scolds his quadrant for telling him only where he is and not where he will be.

Though the Post quoted the greater portion of the review, it omitted the condensed extract of Melville's prose the Athenaeum had included to give readers an example of it. In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that Shakespeare's "unapproachability" is nonsense for an American.In 1852, some remaining sheets were bound in a cheaper casing, and in 1853, enough sheets were still left to issue a cheap edition in one volume. The name Ishmael is Biblical in origin: in Genesis 16:1-16; 17:18-25; 21:6-21; 25:9-17, Ishmael was the son of Abraham by the servant Hagar.

The narrator now discusses the subjects of (1) whalers supply; (2) a glen in Tranque in the Arsacides islands full of carved whale bones, fossil whales, whale skeleton measurements; (3) the chance that the magnitude of the whale will diminish and that the leviathan might perish. Ahab then realizes that the destroyed ship is the hearse made of American wood in Fedallah's prophecy. The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on Hamlet: "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself. Both Ahab and Ishmael are fascinated by the whale, but whereas Ahab perceives him exclusively as evil, Ishmael keeps an open mind. The letter also reveals how Melville experienced his development from his 25th year: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.Balancing chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue", or similars, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles". Melville followed Beale's grouping closely, yet adapted it to what art demanded, and he changed the original's prosaic phrases into graphic figures of speech. In addition to his own experience on the whaling ship Acushnet, two actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale.