Editing Moby-Dick (section)

=== Nine meetings with other ships ===
A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings between the ''Pequod'' and other ships. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative: the initial two meetings and the last two are both close to each other. The central group of five gams are separated by about 12 chapters. This pattern provides a structural element, remarks Bezanson, as if the encounters were "bones to the book's flesh". Second, Ahab's developing responses to the meetings plot the "rising curve of his passion" and of his monomania. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads".<ref name="Bezanson 1953, 654"/>

Bezanson sees no single way to account for the meaning of all of these ships. Instead, they may be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues, a masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale".<ref>Bezanson (1953), 655, italics Bezanson's</ref>

Scholar Nathalia Wright sees the meetings and the significance of the vessels along other lines. She singles out the four vessels which have already encountered Moby Dick. The first, the ''Jeroboam'', is named after the predecessor of the biblical King [[Ahab]]. Her "prophetic" fate is "a message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the ''Samuel Enderby'', the ''Rachel'', the ''Delight'', and at last the ''Pequod''". None of the other ships has been completely destroyed because none of their captains shared Ahab's [[monomania]]; the fate of the ''Jeroboam'' reinforces the structural parallel between Ahab and his biblical namesake: "Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him" ([[Books of Kings|I Kings]] 16:33).<ref>Wright (1949), 66–67</ref>