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Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)—a significant contribution to the American Renaissance movement—developed its reputation as a Great American Novel in the 20th century. D H Lawrence famously called it ‘the greatest book of the sea ever written’, signalling the cultural significance of its epic nautical narrative—the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest to kill the great sperm whale that once took half his leg.

Melville’s fluid rhetorical style is also considered a key feature of the novel’s literary greatness. Critics John Bryant and Haskell Springer argue that ‘above all, Moby-Dick is language: nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic and unceasingly allusive’. Melville interweaves levels of rhetorical language, moving between plain prose and high rhetoric in waves that surprise and intrigue the reader, taking them on an oceanic voyage across the telling of the tale.

Melville’s expository style

Scholar Walter E Bezanson explains that the simplest level in Melville’s style is ‘a relatively straightforward expository style’ in which the narrative, largely in the perspective of the sailor Ishmael, communicates the happenings of the novel—its settings, situations and characters. An early description of the noble nature of Queequeg, the harpooner and native son of a Pacific island chieftain whom Ishmael befriends, demonstrates the poetic force of Melville’s simplest prose. In this passage, the observation of Queequeg’s inherent virtue slices through the racist assumptions* of the age that surround it:

You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.

[*] The ‘noble savage’ archetype, inherently problematic in it primitivism and ‘othering’, is attributed to 18th century Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who viewed the indigenous man as uncorrupted. Melville arguably elevates the trope through his depiction of the close bond between Ishmael and Queequeg, whose importance to the narrative of Moby-Dick cannot be overstated.

Persuasive effect: The observed human truth

The persuasive effect of the assertion—that a man’s virtuous or vicious ‘soul’ is evident in his bearing and countenance—is due to the pointed nature of the line and its easy, familiar use of the second person in addressing the reader. Its expression reads and sounds like a universal truth of human nature. The use of the formal contraction ‘cannot’ strengthens the phrase with stateliness, suggesting the impossibility of concealing one’s true moral character. The soul of a self is apparent, it states, and will makes itself known.

The wisdom of the line recalls a similar kind of observed human truth in another sea-faring context. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), the opening line states that ‘Ships on the horizon have every man’s wish onboard’, suggesting all men cast their dreams onto boats they spy on the ocean. The title of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), declares empathically that there is no returning to the places of our youth, no matter how much you may long to escape into the past.

The power of the observed human truth lies in its universal resonance—as a profound insight into the human condition—and in its declarative strength, which makes the writer or speaker expressing it seem like a sage.