The focus of Moby-Dick shifts as Melville works his way through his vast material

As Ishmael prepares to ship out on the Pequod and in fact does ship out, on xmas day, the focus of "Moby-Dick" shifts, even alters, as if Melville were feeling his way through his vast material (he probably was) - it's no longer an examination of the character of Ishmael, as it seemed to be n the first chapter - Ishmael is more of the window through which we can see the world of whaling and the profound an odd symbolism that's developed around whales and whaling, and it's no longer "buddy" story about the unusual friendship, possibly erotic, between Ishmael and Queequeg, which is the first strand of the story Melville lays out - now it's about the mysterious Captain Ahab, and all of the foreboding surrounding him - why he doesn't appear on the ship until they are out to sea, what is the nature of his illness from which he's recovering, why for forebodings and the warnings from the mariner Elijah? Obviously Melville lays the religious and Biblical allusions on thick, a grad-student's delight (the ship owners like heaven and hell, or maybe a thousand other polar opposites, for example) - but I think Melville had a great interest in all the diurnal details of whaling as well as the deep strangeness and mystery of this vanished (and in his time already vanishing) profession. Strange, as I write this in Nantucket, to walk the streets and see the houses, modest and grand, and know that the wealth of this island built on whaling - the very odd culture in which the men were away for years at a time, the women ran the politics and the daily life - to this day very beautiful artifacts on display in the museuam, the scrimshaw, the logbooks of the journeys with delicate illustrations of foreign ports, the tools of the trade. Heard in the museum a great narration of the wreck of the Essex, rammed by a whale in the Pacific in 1820, often cited as a source for Moby-Dick, but it's really only the source for the final chapter or two - the story of the Essex is more about survival for 96 days in a small craft on the Pacific, starvation, cannibalism, murder, insanity - another great story but not this one.