Moby-Dick is written in a highly convoluted and ornamental style that revels in figurative language and drips with rich literary allusions. The density of Moby-Dick is immediately evident, not only in its great length but also in its introductory apparatus. The inclusion of “Extracts,” a chapter that details the many references to whales throughout literature from the Bible to Shakespeare, makes clear the grand ambitions of the novel.
Melville’s use of syntax is hugely varied but tends towards the convoluted. The syntax proves effective in injecting the novel with an overarching sense of busyness, something that reflects the frantic quality of life aboard a ship and the action-driven nature of the narrative. Melville, for example, frequently uses extremely long sentences filled with clauses and subclauses and broken by dashes and semicolons that can often be difficult to navigate. Indeed, it is likely that this difficulty is intentional, with Melville having written about his championing of the discerning reader and his belief that literature should be read quickly and leisurely but studied and examined for layers of meaning. By making his prose so elaborate, Melville forces the reader to become such a discerning reader.
While the style proves consistent in its density and complexity, the formal style of the novel is highly varied. It includes elements such as the aforementioned fictional apparatus of the extracts and etymology, but also chapters of rich, elaborate prose. It contains chapters that are written in a highly personal tone, reflecting on Ishmael’s own experience, while also containing chapters written as scenes of a play that explore the interior lives of other characters, namely Ahab.
Meanwhile, the pacing also varies greatly. While some chapters closely follow the action of the story, painting in vivid detail the events of the Pequod, there are many chapters in the novel that indulge long tangents by Ishmael on topics such as the artistic renderings of whales (Chapters 55-57) or the ins and outs of the unwritten codes of sailing, complete with highly overwrought accounts of specific cases in law (Chapter 89). All of this works to inject the novel’s style with an element of collage, with the narrative seeming to patch together scraps of information in such a way that reflects Ishmael’s own accumulation of knowledge.
