"Call me Ismael." Very few literary characters are as well known today as the white whale, or Ishmael or Captain Ahab, and there is probably no such famous novel opening as that of Moby-Dick. Conceived by Herman Melville as a North American response to the great European literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Moby-Dick gathers together the romantic and Gothic tradition, shaping an epic poem that has come to occupy the position of a great novel in the United States. national and to be considered as the great prose epic of the contemporary Western world.