Moby Dick (whale) evil, the ocean, and the very universe itself. Yet the symbolism of the White Whale is deliberately enigmatic, and its inscrutability is a deliberate challenge to the reader. Ishmael describes the whale’s forehead as having wrinkles and scars on it that look like hieroglyphics. He muses on the difficulty of understanding what he saw: Moby Dick (whale) Moby Dick is a fictional sperm whale who is the main antagonist in Herman Melville's 1851 novel of the same name. Melville based the fictional whale partially on a real albino whale of that period called Mocha Dick. Ishmael describes Moby Dick as
Billy Budd published book. Melville incorporated the ballad and expanded the head-note sketch into a story that eventually reached 150 manuscript pages. This was the first of what were to be three major expansions, each related to one of the principal characters. Melville had a difficult time writing, describing his process with "Moby-Dick" as follows: "Taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole business in order to get at it with safety." The "scrapings" of "Billy Budd" lie in the 351 leaves