Moby Dick is what it looks like: the whalers are whalers, the ship is a ship, the whale is a whale. "Deeper meanings" are not as characteristic of literary fic

Moby Dick is what it looks like: the whalers are whalers, the ship is a ship, the whale is a whale. "Deeper meanings" are not as characteristic of literary fiction as your high school English teacher might like you to believe. But whereas stories on the pulpier end of the spectrum create characters to meet the demands of the plot, Moby Dick's plot is a delivery mechanism for its characters. Ahab, for instance, is exactly what he appears to be: a person obsessed with getting revenge on a whale. But Melville's portrayal of Ahab is psychologically rich enough to contain many elements which are common to questionably-attainable obsessions in general, and this is what people are usually talking about when they talk about literary symbolism. Ahab's relationship with the whale isn't a metaphor for man's search for meaning any more than it's a metaphor for my struggle to get my coworkers to stop throwing denormalized garbage in the schema - but it resembles both of them, and many other things besides.