How Moby-Dick or, The Whale drew on Ecclesiastes
A documented line of influence: Herman Melville demonstrably engaged Solomon’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Ecclesiastes
Solomon · c. 250 BCE
BibleThe influenced
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 1851
The Age of the NovelRelevance
9/10
On Moby-Dick or, The Whale’s page
- The book Ishmael ranks above all others — "the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe"
- Melville marked it heavily in his own KJV; the "wisdom that is woe" lands straight out of Ecclesiastes 1:18
- Read Solomon first and Moby-Dick's pessimism stops looking like a mood and starts looking like a tradition
On Ecclesiastes’s page
- Melville called it "the truest of all books" — and meant it as the spine of Moby-Dick
- In the Try-Works chapter, Ishmael names Ecclesiastes "the fine hammered steel of woe," the standard against which all other grief is measured
- The vanity, the wind-chasing, the wisdom-that-is-sorrow of Solomon becomes the whole metaphysical weather of the whaling voyage