Herman Melville's Moby Dick questions on several elements, such as fate vs free will vs. chance and who is good and who is evil. But the question for Melville is, why the biblical allegories? The novel starts off as, "Call Me Ishmael." This quote is a clear reference to Abraham's son Ishmael. Perhaps Melville was attempting to to set a sympathetic mood, or he was conveying that man is inferior by referring to the bible, because God is the big guy here, and man is not. These biblical references created excellent points in Melville's work, but he has exhausted the text with religion, pulling the reader away from the key concepts.
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