Plot Summary
Chapter 55 of Moby-Dick is a digressive essay in which surveys the long history of inaccurate visual depictions of whales. Before painting the whale’s "true form" himself, he promises to expose the errors of every artist, sculptor, and naturalist who has tried before him. The chapter is a catalog of failed representations, beginning with the oldest known whale image—a half-man, half-whale sculpture in the cavern-pagoda of Elephanta in India, depicting the Matse Avatar incarnation of Vishnu—and continuing through ancient Greek and Egyptian art, where dolphins were rendered in chain-armor like medieval knights.
A Survey of Artistic Failures
Ishmael moves chronologically through Western art, critiquing Guido Reni’s painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, Hogarth’s version of the same scene (whose whale has "a sort of howdah on its back"), old Bible illustrations of Jonah’s whale, and the decorative dolphin-whale found on bookbinders’ title pages since the Italian Renaissance. He then turns to supposedly scientific illustrations: Dutch whaling voyage plates showing whales "like great rafts of logs" with polar bears on their backs, Captain Colnett’s absurdly scaled sperm whale drawing with a bow-window-sized eye, Goldsmith’s Animated Nature with a whale that "looks much like an amputated sow," and the works of naturalists Lacépède and Frederick Cuvier, whose sperm whale Ishmael dismisses as "not a Sperm Whale, but a squash."
Why Accurate Depiction Is Impossible
Ishmael explains the root cause of these failures: most drawings are based on stranded or dead whales, which are "about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship" would be for representing a vessel under full sail. The living whale can only be seen at sea, where the vast bulk of its body remains submerged. Its skeleton alone gives "very little idea of his general shape," since bone and blubber bear entirely different contours—much as an insect differs from the chrysalis enclosing it. Even the whale’s side fin conceals four finger-like bones invisible beneath the flesh.
Themes and Significance
uses this chapter to develop one of the novel’s central philosophical themes: the impossibility of fully representing reality. The whale becomes a symbol of any subject too vast, too fluid, and too deeply embedded in its element to be captured by human art or science. Ishmael concludes that "the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last," and the only way to gain even a tolerable idea of the whale’s form is to go whaling yourself—"but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him." The chapter’s wit and erudition make it one of the most entertaining of Moby-Dick’s cetological digressions.