Editing Moby-Dick (section)

=== Chapter structure ===
According to critic Walter Bezanson, the chapter structure can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter clusters", and "balancing chapters". The simplest sequences are of narrative progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters on whale painting, and sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". Chapter clusters are the chapters on the significance of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire. Balancing chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue", or similars, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles".<ref>Bezanson (1953), 653</ref>

Scholar [[Lawrence Buell (academic)|Lawrence Buell]] describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters{{NoteTag|Chapters that are of a non-narrative, descriptive type are 32–33, 35, 42, 45, 55–57, 62–63, 68, 74–77, 79–80, 82–83, 85–86, 88–90, 92, and 101–105. Together, they constitute about one fifth of the total number of chapters.{{citation needed|date=November 2019}}}} as structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the ''Pequod'' with ships that have encountered Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged, foreshadowing the ''Pequod''{{'}}s own fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". A typhoon near Japan sets the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick.<ref name="Buell 2014, 367"/>

The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters start with the ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically ordered commentary on pictures of whales. The climax to this section is chapter 57, "Of whales in paint etc.", which begins with the humble (a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus the other half of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live whales, and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied, more or less from front to rear and from outer to inner parts, all the way down to the skeleton. Two concluding chapters set forth the whale's evolution as a species and claim its eternal nature.<ref name="Buell 2014, 367">Buell (2014), 367</ref>

Some "ten or more" of the chapters on whale killings, beginning at two-fifths of the book, are developed enough to be called "events". As Bezanson writes, "in each case a killing provokes either a chapter sequence or a chapter cluster of cetological lore growing out of the circumstance of the particular killing," thus these killings are "structural occasions for ordering the whaling essays and sermons".<ref name="Bezanson 1953, 654">Bezanson (1953), 654</ref>

Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator.<ref name="Buell 2014, 365">Buell (2014), 365</ref> As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education".<ref>Milder (1988), 434</ref>

Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as a force of linearity and Ishmael a force of digression.<ref name="Bryant and Springer 2007, xvi">Bryant and Springer (2007), xvi</ref> 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. And while the plot in ''Moby-Dick'' may be driven by Ahab's anger, Ishmael's desire to get a hold of the "ungraspable" accounts for the novel's lyricism.<ref>Bryant and Springer (2007), x</ref> Buell sees a double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt".<ref name="Buell 2014, 365"/>

One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry.<ref>Bezanson (1986), 188</ref> He calls Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre "a Nabokovian touch".<ref>Bezanson (1986), 195</ref>