Sorry, didn’t read it.
I read it, but it has been a while. I don’t know if Melville mentioned the length. The whale in question was a sperm whale, though so 50 to 60 feet long seems like the range for adult males.
Maybe it was just that white makes you look larger.
Moby was based on Mocha Dick, who was 70’ long.
A very large Sperm whale is 85’, such as the one that sank the whaler* Essex*. Moby’s exact dimensions are never given, but the book claims that the largest sperm whales can reach a length of ninety feet (larger than any officially recorded sperm whale) and that Moby Dick is likely the largest sperm whale that ever lived.
So, thus= 90’+.
I’m sure there’s a joke in here somewhere, I just can’t see it.
You do know that Sperm whales are sorta black, right?
“Only Melville could think that a white Dick is bigger than a black Dick.”
Please read it. Some of the stuff I had to read for school was awful (Frankenstein, anything by Dickens). But some was great- like Moby Dick. I’ve re-read that thing a few times on my own. It has some flaws ( Some parts are written like a play, Ishmael has perfect knowledge of some events he wasn’t present for and which nobody ever told him about). BUT, it is truly a classic.
Oh, and Moby Dick is also defined by a wrinkled forehead, a crooked jaw, and many old harpoons still in his flesh.
Wasn’t Moby Dick supposed to be as large as a whale?
I was going to say that Melville was going for the biggest Dick around, but as post #2 I probably would have gotten whacked again. 
Over 500 pages.
Frankenstein and Dickens can be great if you are not forced to read them. Same with Moby Dick.
Meville sailed on the whaleship Acushnet from my hometown on January 3, 1841. Across the harbor in New Bedford there is an annual Moby-Dick marathon reading on January 3-4. (This year’s was the 19th.) A slew of guests read the whole thing aloud at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It takes them about 25 hours to do it.
Based on Billy Budd I’d say he had done some research, but apparently not enough.
Raw numbers do not have the majesty that a Moby Dick of the imagination needs to impress the reader. “Ninety feet,” the reader may ask, “That’s not so big.” As a symbol Moby Dick is as big as you need him to be. You bring your own Moby Dick to the book and he inflates (engorges?) until you are overawed by his immensity.
Yes, I was a literature major for a semester. Why do you ask?
“There she blows!-there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” so as big as a snow-hill at the hump. 
I really liked this novel. Off topic did anyone else read the very long and enjoyable “Ahab’s Wife?”
http://www.amazon.com/Ahabs-Wife-Star-gazer-Novel-P-S/dp/0060838744
So how big was Moby Dick’s Dick?
From your link on Mocha Dick:
But it’s not clear that this should count as “officially recorded”.
I heard he discovered a truly remarkable proof of Moby Dick’s real size which the margin was too small to contain.
I have a question about this painting. Are the proportions anywhere near correct, or is this whale’s size exaggerated?
(My untrained sense of proportion is that the whale is much too large, and the painting is exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Also, it’s a very impressive painting!)
[QUOTE=Wile E]
I’m sure there’s a joke in here somewhere, I just can’t see it.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, I forgot the winky face smiley. I could actually think of lots of jokes, I just didn’t want to make them.
Well, he was no blue whale…
Symbolically speaking, and regardless of whether Melville intended it, the vastness of the ocean is the subconscious and the clean slate. The Whale is the embodiment of the capability of nature, including human nature, to casually hurt humankind, and when humankind turns that aspect of nature into an imagined evil and tries to destroy it, it becomes an obsession with destroying nature and the self, which is a part of nature, which will implacably turn on man and destroy him with an implacability matching the obsession, be that obsession destruction, war or profit.
Life will occasionally bite off the leg of the working man. Trying to stab the sun in revenge isn’t dealing with it, it is destructive insanity.