Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” stands out as an oddity in several ways. As the note tells you, it was published in Harper’s (one of the two most important literary magazines in American history, along with The Atlantic, both of which are still published today) six weeks before Moby-Dick itself was published. It is a stand-alone narrative without any direct connection to the novel’s plot, other than Moby Dick’s brief appearance toward the end. Melville chooses to break the book’s chronology by having Ishmael narrate the story the way he tells us he told it some years in Lima, Peru. He has no real need to do this, of course. Why do you think Melville includes this story, and why does he present it in such an oddly disconnected way?
This section of the reading contains one of the few scenes of real action in the book. In any movie adaptation, the scene of the sperm whale kill takes up disproportionate screen-time. Discuss Melville as a writer of action.
This portion of the reading contains a large number of short chapters that give us all kinds of information about the whale’s habits, anatomy, and more. On one level, this represents more of the mixing of genres that is typical of the book, and which accounts for some of its strangeness. But can you imagine any more of a thematic reason for this approach? In other words, how might we read into this strange mixing of genres a theme or message that gives the book a paradoxical aesthetic unity?