The 18 months he spent as an ordinary seaman aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841–42, and one incident in particular, now served as inspiration. While both have an angry sense of being orphaned, they try to come to terms with this hole in their beings in different ways: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation.

The catalyst for this transformation, which made the difference between another thrilling yarn in the mould of Omoo or Redburn, and one of the greatest – if not the greatest – novels ever written, was font size. Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, Moby-Dick is language: "nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic and unceasingly allusive". Only a couple of reviewers expressed themselves early enough not to be influenced by news of the British reception. Melville also borrowed stylistic qualities from Renaissance Humanists such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. In Chapter 89, " Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, Ishmael expounds the legal concept "fast-fish and loose-fish", which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship; he compares the concept to events in history, such as the European colonization of the Americas, the partitions of Poland, and the Mexican–American War.I suppose that many people in the USA at the time had never seen a whale and knew nothing about the ocean and these chapters perform the task now carried out by television programmes. Melville stretches grammar, quotes well-known or obscure sources, or swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism. During the early decades of the Melville revival, readers and critics often confused Ishmael with Melville, whose works were perceived as autobiography. Starbuck begs Ahab to desist, but Ahab vows to slay the white whale, even if he would have to dive through the globe itself to get his revenge. Fourteen chapters later, in "The Gilder," he participates in "what is clearly a recapitulation" of the earlier chapter.

Frankly I don’t think just one can be singled out as the best, personal tastes would interfere in the final decision, right? what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! Vincent, in his study The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, "warned against forgetting the narrator", that is, assuming that Ishmael was merely describing what he saw. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. The final difference in the material not already plated is that the "Epilogue", thus Ishmael's miraculous survival, is omitted from the British edition.His close reading of them occupies the central section of the essay, as he traces the passage of Melville’s thought from flyleaf scribbles into the manuscript of his novel. Fleece, at Stubb's request, delivers a sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale's carcass, tied to the ship, saying that their nature is to be voracious, but they must overcome it. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. An epigraph from Paradise Lost, taken from the second of the two quotations from that work in the American edition, appears on the title page of each of the three British volumes.