Moby Dick Herman Melville

Ishmael describes Moby Dick as having two prominent white areas around "a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump", the rest of his body being of stripes and patches between white and gray. The animal's exact dimensions are never given, but the novel 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 possibly the largest sperm whale that ever lived. Ahab tells the crew that the White Whale can be told because he has an unusual spout, a deformed jaw, three punctures in his right fluke and several harpoons embedded in his side from unsuccessful hunts.[4] Yet Ishmael insists that what invested the whale with "natural terror" was that "unexampled, intelligent malignity" which he had shown in his assaults. When he fled before "exalting pursuers", giving every symptom of alarm, he would suddenly turn round and stave their boats to splinters or drive them back to their ship. What seemed the White Whale's "infernal aforethought of ferocity" that every dismembering or death that he caused was not wholly regarded as that of an "unintelligent agent". He bit off Ahab's leg, leaving Ahab to swear "wild vindictiveness" on him. Ishmael, however, is haunted by a "nameless horror" so "mystical and well nigh ineffable" that he could hardly express; it was "the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me".

At the end of the novel, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod. Ahab and the crew are drowned, with the exception of Ishmael. The novel does not say whether Moby Dick survives or not.