Chapter clusters are the chapters on the significance of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire. Moby-Dick was out of print during the last four years of Melville's life, having sold 2,300 in its first year and a half and on average 27 copies a year for the next 34 years, totaling 3,215 copies. Melville’s novel was largely forgotten after its publication in 1851, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that it came to be regarded as a major work.

A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. 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. The Morning Advertiser for October 24 was in awe of Melville's learning, of his "dramatic ability for producing a prose poem", and of the whale adventures which were "powerful in their cumulated horrors.

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. Other characteristic stylistic elements are the echoes and overtones, both imitation of distinct styles and habitual use of sources to shape his own work. Ishmael Leseur is cursed with a name that demands attention - mostly from class bully Barry Bagsley and his gang of goons. Melville found the bulk of his data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850. Fleece, the black cook of the Pequod, was probably modeled on this Philadelphia-born William Maiden.

Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. Although he was the most famous, Mocha Dick was not the only white whale in the sea, nor the only whale to attack hunters. But the shareholders of the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and orphaned children. Olson perceived in Moby Dick, the making an an American mythology, reflecting the attempt at a conquest of nature. Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Melville's involvement with this rearrangement is not clear: if it was Bentley's gesture toward accommodating Melville, as Tanselle suggests, [132] its selection put an emphasis on the quotation Melville might not have agreed with. Melville attended a service there shortly before he shipped out on the Acushnet, and he heard a sermon by Reverend Enoch Mudge, who is at least in part the inspiration for Father Mapple. The first American printing of 2,915 copies was almost the same as the first of Mardi, but the first printing of Melville's other three Harper books had been a thousand copies more. 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.