Moby Dick (1956 film) actor Walter Huston as Ahab, but he had died in 1950. Peck went on to play the role of Father Mapple in the 1998 television miniseries adaptation of Melville's novel, with Patrick Stewart as Ahab. Welles later used the salary from his cameo to fund his own stage production of "Moby Dick", in which Rod Steiger played Captain Ahab. Gregory Peck, comparing his performances in this film and the 1998 "Moby Dick" miniseries, said he liked the miniseries better because it was more faithful to the novel. During a meeting to discuss the screenplay, Ray Bradbury informed John Huston that
Ishmael (Moby-Dick) complained as early as 1941 that "most of the criticism of our past masters has been perfunctorily tacked onto biographies" and objected to the "modern fallacy" of the "direct reading of an author's personal life into his works." In 1948 Howard P. Vincent, in his study "The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick", "warned against forgetting the narrator." Robert Zoellner says that "traditional criticism" argues that Ishmael's role as narrator "breaks down" either when Ahab and Stubb "have a conversation off by themselves" in chapter 29 or else when Ishmael reports "the soliloquy of Ahab sitting alone" in chapter 37. Ishmael (Moby-Dick) Ishmael