Moby Dick (1998 miniseries) of Starbuck to stop chasing Moby Dick because the ship is operating at a loss and the quest for the sperm whale could end in everyone's death. Queequeg engages in passive resistance by completing refusing to do any work on the ship and throws down his harpoon. At the end, Ahab dies in his attempt to kill Moby Dick. The whaling ship sinks. Patrick Stewart took the lead role shortly after making a striking reference to the book, and quoting from it, in "". Gregory Peck appeared as Father Mapple more than 40 years after he played Ahab in the
Moby-Dick mention of the composition of what became "Moby-Dick" is the final paragraph of the letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850: Some scholars have concluded that Melville composed "Moby-Dick" in two or even three stages. Reasoning from a series of inconsistencies and structural developments in the final version, they hypothesize that the work he mentioned to Dana was, in the words of Lawrence Buell, a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure, but that reading Shakespeare and his encounters with Hawthorne inspired him to rewrite it as "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions". Bezanson objects that the letter