The wandering schoolmaster-turned-sailor who signs aboard the Pequod out of restlessness and a hunger for the sea. As the novel's narrator he is both participant and philosopher, digressing into whaling lore, theology and natural history. He is the sole survivor of the Pequod's final hunt.
The monomaniacal commander of the Pequod, whose leg was sheared away by the white whale on a previous voyage. Ahab converts a commercial whaling expedition into a private hunt for vengeance, binding his crew to the chase with an oath and a doubloon nailed to the mast.
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.”
An enormous albino sperm whale of legendary ferocity, marked by a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw. To Ahab he is the embodiment of malice in the universe; to Ishmael his whiteness is a blank on which every meaning can be written. He destroys the Pequod in the novel's final chase.
A tattooed harpooneer and prince from the South Sea island of Kokovoko, and Ishmael's bosom friend from their first night at the Spouter-Inn. Generous, fearless and devout in his own faith, he has a coffin built during an illness, and that coffin becomes Ishmael's life-buoy.
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
A Quaker from Nantucket, prudent, pious and the only officer who openly resists Ahab's quest. He recognises the voyage as blasphemous and at one point considers killing the captain in his sleep, but cannot bring himself to act.
“I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance.”
An easy-going Cape Cod man, forever with a pipe in his mouth, who meets danger and death with jokes and fatalism. He is a skilled whaleman who treats the hunt as good sport rather than a moral matter.
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
A short, stocky, pugnacious officer from Martha's Vineyard, nicknamed 'King-Post'. He hunts whales without awe or reflection, regarding them as little more than oversized vermin to be killed for profit.
“They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod”
A Gay Head Wampanoag from Martha's Vineyard, lithe and unerring with the harpoon. He is nearly drowned inside a whale's severed head and is the last man visible as the Pequod sinks, nailing a flag to the mast.
A towering African harpooneer of immense dignity and strength, who joined a whaler as a young man and never returned home. He towers over the diminutive Flask, whom he carries on his shoulders in the boats.
The enigmatic Parsee who appears from Ahab's secretly stowed boat crew. He delivers an oracular prophecy about hearses and hemp that Ahab misreads as a guarantee of survival, and dies lashed to the white whale.
A young Black cabin boy from Alabama who leaps from a whaleboat and is left alone in the immensity of the open sea. Rescued but unmoored in mind, he becomes the ship's holy fool, and Ahab takes him in with a tenderness he shows no one else.
“Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects”
A former harpooneer turned New Bedford preacher, who climbs a rope ladder to a pulpit shaped like a ship's bow and delivers the sermon on Jonah that frames the novel's themes of obedience and pride.
“Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah”
A ragged stranger who accosts Ishmael and Queequeg on the Nantucket docks with dark hints about Ahab and the fate awaiting anyone who ships aboard the Pequod.
Two retired Quaker whalemen who own the ship and sign on its crew. Peleg is blustering and loud, Bildad piously tight-fisted, and between them they haggle Ishmael and Queequeg into miserly shares of the voyage's profits.
“It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage”
An English captain who lost an arm to Moby Dick and, unlike Ahab, counts himself lucky to be rid of the whale. His cheerful pragmatism is the sharpest foil to Ahab's obsession.
The Nantucket captain whose son is lost in a whaleboat and who begs Ahab to help search. Ahab refuses — and it is the Rachel, still seeking her children, that finally picks up Ishmael.