The most positive statements are that it will be a strange sort of a book and that Melville means to give the truth of the thing, but what thing exactly is not clear. By the end of the month, "wearied with the long delay of printers", Melville came back to finish work on the book in Pittsfield.

For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.The earliest American review, in the Boston Post for November 20, quoted the London Athenaeum 's scornful review, not realizing that some of the criticism of The Whale did not pertain to Moby-Dick.

Bronnie is so lovely with the boys and we also felt that having a man enthusing about the books set a great example. Biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the reason for the change was that Harper's had two years earlier published a book with a similar title, The Whale and His Captors. Excluding the preliminaries and the one extract, the three volumes of the British edition came to 927 pages [128] and the single American volume to 635 pages.

In the case of Moby-Dick, Melville had taken almost a year longer than promised, and could not rely on Harpers to prepare the proofs as they had done for the earlier books.

The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury. This list was probably drawn up by Melville himself: the titles of chapters describing encounters of the Pequod with other ships had—apparently to stress the parallelisms between these chapters—been standardized to "The Pequod meets the . A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings (gams) between the Pequod and other ships.

One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after a sperm whale rammed her 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America. In October Harper's New Monthly Magazine printed chapter 54, "The Town-Ho's Story", with a footnote saying: "From The Whale. The Snail and the Whale: A Push, Pull and Slide Book is the perfect introduction to the bestselling picture book The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, creators of The Gruffalo, and a great gift for fans of the original story. In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and asides. Set in the near future on the island of Cetacea, amidst a flooded world, the oppressed people believe their world is controlled by rules set by whales.

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. According to critic Walter Bezanson, the chapter structure can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter clusters", and "balancing chapters". The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination.

To its surprise, John Bull found "philosophy in whales" and "poetry in blubber", and concluded that few books that claimed to be either philosophical or literary works "contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod 's whaling expedition", making it a work "far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction". The British reviewers, according to Parker, mostly regarded The Whale as "a phenomenal literary work, a philosophical, metaphysical, and poetic romance". Similar passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual democracy" in the middle of "Knights and Squires".