Moby Dick is about uncertainty and certainty

At one end of the spectrum is a conceptual understanding of the world. You look at a whale and before you even see the whale consciously, your mind has recognised the basic pattern of its whale-ness. The whale therefore has the status of a concept.

Let's take one step along the spectrum, and try to short circuit the automatic conceptualisation and consciously take in the detail of what the whale actually looks like. There are lots of great passages of detailed whale descriptions in Moby Dick.

Let's take another step along the spectrum and begin to notice the ways in which the whale keeps changing. It moves through space and time. The quality of light around the whale keeps changing. Over time, the whale changes dramatically. In the Grand Armada, one of the nursing whales, still tethered by an umbilical cord to its mother, “measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth”. By the Final Chase, gestated in fury, Moby Dick is a “vast form” bursting from the ocean.

The last step is to recognise that the whale doesn’t exist either just in the external world or in the mind but in the interplay between the two.

"The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable…Dissect him how I may, then, I go but skin deep; I know him not, and never will"

Quotes “a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.“

maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats

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