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 10, 1924). In relatively short order he and several other influential British literati had managed to canonize "Billy Budd", placing it alongside "Moby-Dick" as one of the great books of Western literature. Wholly unknown to the public until 1924, "Billy Budd" by 1926 had joint billing with the book that had just recently been firmly established as a literary masterpiece. In its first text and subsequent texts, and as read by different audiences, the book has kept that high status ever since. In 1990 the Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker pointed out that all the early estimations of "Billy