Melville"s style can be summarized in five points.
(I) His writing is consciously literary. His rich rhythmical prose and poetic power show his high craftsmanship. He made many references to former authors in their works, the Bible and Shakespeare in particular. In Moby Dick, for example, there are many allusions to classical myths. Therefore, Moby Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic, a Shakespearean tragedy of man fighting against overwhelming odds in an indifferent and even hostile world. The literary quality of Melville"s style makes him extremely difficult to understand. On the one hand, much of the talk in the novel is sailor talk; on the other hand, he wrote in an old style. Some of his language is old-fashioned manifesting Elizabethan influence. He did so purposely to raise the importance of the subject that he was discussing.
(2) There is a threefold quality in his writing: the style of fact, the style of oratory celebrating the fact, and the style of meditation. Melville was influenced by popular American oratory, known as the Lyceum movement in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Melville himself gave such public lectures sometimes. Therefore, he wrote as if he were giving a public speech.
(3) His style is highly symbolic and metaphorical. In this respect he was like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Moby Dick is a tragic epic, a romance of moral inquiry about the nature of good and evil, and about the power of will to defy fate. It is a naturalistic story of whale-hunting, yet metaphorical and symbolic. The ship on the ocean is a symbol of the whole world with people of every land sailing across the waters of life in quest of its mystery. The voyage is a metaphor for search and discovery. The ship is one of the American soul. The ship is also a microcosm of American society. It contains representatives of most social and ethnic groups, and their various reactions to the chase. Moby Dick itself represents the mystery of the universe.
(4) This hook has many non-narrative chapters, and this is how Melville changed an adventure story into a philosophical novel. Many chapters in the hook have nothing to do with" the search for the whale; rather, these chapters give factual background information about what goes on aboard the ship on a routine day. It contains all of life.
(5) He used the technique of multiple views to achieve the effect of ambiguity.
