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argument, he typically writes with a long rhythmic breath, and often in periodic sentences that go on and on, withholding the point until the end. By then we have worked through the accumulated evidence given in a series of parallel phrases beginning with “considering that . . .” or “though . . .” or “while . . . ,” and the effect is to pile on detail so thickly that we are finally moved to agree, or if the purpose is a joking one we listen to the mock-serious detail leading to the final surprise. The mounting particulars may be either real or fanciful, but the result is to press us into a corner. A passage in “Stubb’s Supper” (chap. LXIV) shows this kind of construction shaped to a grim purpose, and contains a kind of ambiguity deeply characteristic of Melville’s mind as he deflates human pretensions by comparing men with a school of sharks feeding on a whale’s carcass roped to the ship (p. 346).
    The novel’s third stylistic manner is what one can call the American sublime, a high and extravagant rhetoric designed to sweep us away in an emotion-charged thought so powerful that we for a time suspend judgment in the thrill of the linguistic flood. In such a passage the frequently bantering air and comedic exaggeration drop away as the skeptical intelligence that creates that tone is suspended. The intention now is to immerse us in poetic language so moving that we at least temporarily yield assent to the ideas and emotions asked of us. The earliest example is a brief passage at the end of chapter I and is the narrator’s first reference to the yet-unnamed Moby Dick: “There floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” (p. 32).
    This is a dangerous mode because unless the writer’s intelligence and gift for characterization are just as powerful as the rhetoric is radical, such passages become mere purple-patches, sounding false and sentimental because they demand emotion that has not been earned, not prepared for, in the rest of the text. In Melville one can see failures of this kind in his third novel, Mardi, that strange and interesting work in which he begins to experiment with unconventional narrative. The problem in Mardi is not a lack of intelligence, which Melville had in spades, but the rather wooden characterizations brought about by what Ishmael calls “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Many of the figures there do not so much breathe and act as stand for things, which was also Hawthorne’s problem when he was not writing from his strengths.
    In Moby-Dick , however, Melville is at the peak of his powers, and the intermittent passages of heightened rhetoric operate as epiphanies within a larger context either of description or of an argument already developed in the passages leading to the poetic rise. For example, in chapter XCVI, “The Try-Works,” there is an elevated passage of this kind, by no means the most extreme, which sums up the preceding discussion. While at the ship’s helm, Ishmael has become mesmerized by staring into the fire, and he almost capsizes the vessel. Near the chapter’s end there is an appeal to maintain a balanced view of the world: “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!” (p. 492). One must be aware not only of evil, but also of the good.
    In the chapter’s last paragraph, Melville develops a metaphor confirming the earlier assertions.
    Give not thyself up then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even