Moby-Dick Chapter 55 Summary
Monstrous Pictures of Whales
The narrator critiques and mocks the many inaccurate artistic and scientific depictions of whales and explains why a true portrait is impossible.
Summary
The narrator opens by promising to describe the whale as he appears to the whaleman alongside a ship, but first surveys a history of grotesquely inaccurate portraits and sculptures of whales. He traces these pictorial errors from ancient Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian art—citing the Elephanta pagoda’s Matse Avatar and other temple carvings—through Renaissance and later European paintings (Guido, Hogarth) and popular printers’ and binder’s devices, arguing that many of the fanciful images derive from long-standing decorative conventions rather than observation.
He then turns to supposedly sober scientific illustrations and voyage plates, cataloguing specific absurdities: whales drawn like rafts among ice, whales with perpendicular flukes, absurdly oversized eyes in a Captain Colnett plate, and grotesque renderings in popular natural histories (Goldsmith) and systematic works (Lacépède, Desmarest, Cuvier). The narrator blames many of these errors on artists working from stranded or dissected specimens, skeletons, or foreign drawings (Chinese cups), none of which convey the living whale’s true contours. He emphasizes that the whale’s flesh, blubber, and living form differ radically from its skeleton or a hauled-up body, and concludes that the living Leviathan, afloat in deep waters, remains essentially unpaintable; only by going whaling might one see its true form, though at great peril.
Key events
- Narrator promises a forthcoming true description of the whale as seen alongside a ship
- Survey of ancient and artistic depictions (Elephanta, Guido, Hogarth, biblical prints) and their faults
- Critique of scientific and voyage plates (Harris, Colnett, Cuvier, Lacépède, Goldsmith) for inaccuracies
- Argument that stranded whales, skeletons, and foreign models mislead artists and naturalists
- Observation on whale anatomy (side fin bones like human fingers) and Stubb's humorous remark
- Conclusion that the living whale cannot be accurately painted and viewing it requires dangerous whaling
Analysis
This chapter functions as a digressive blend of polemic and comic erudition: Ishmael (the narrator) undermines authoritative visual and scientific representations of the whale, insisting that experience at sea is the only legitimate source for knowledge. The rhetorical strategy mixes learned citations (ancients, modern naturalists, voyage books) with satiric exaggeration, both to puncture the pretensions of armchair scholarship and to celebrate the whaleman’s embodied knowledge. Thematically, the passage underscores Melville’s recurring skepticism toward secondhand authority and the difference between sign and thing—words, pictures, or skeletons fail to convey the living Leviathan’s magnitude and mystery.
Structurally the chapter forms part of the novel’s encyclopedic interludes: it pauses narrative momentum to build atmosphere and epistemic caution, conditioning readers to distrust facile representations. Symbolically, the whale as an unpaintable creature prefigures later moments where Moby Dick resists human comprehension and control. The chapter’s humor (comic grotesques, lampoons of scientific figures) and conversational voice (first-person asides, nautical quips like Stubb’s) also develop narrative persona: a learned, ironic guide who values practical seamanship over theory and delights in correcting cultural misconceptions.
Important quotes
“I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.”
NarratorOpening promise to provide a true description of the whale, establishing the chapter's corrective purpose.
“However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.”
StubbStubb’s wry comment on whale anatomy (side fin bones), adding comic relief and sailorly voice.
“the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.”
NarratorConcluding assertion that no image or skeleton can capture the living whale’s true form.
Characters in Chapter 55
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