About 1,500 copies were sold within 11 days, and then sales slowed down to less than 300 the next year.

Balancing chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue", or similars, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles". The reviewer of the December New York Eclectic Magazine had actually read Moby-Dick in full, and was puzzled why the Athenaeum was so scornful of the ending.Chapters that are of a non-narrative, descriptive type are 32–33, 35, 42, 45, 55–57, 62–63, 68, 74–77, 79–80, 82–83, 85–86, 88–90, 92, and 101–105. Vincent, the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings.

Only a couple of reviewers expressed themselves early enough not to be influenced by news of the British reception. In the second gam off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho, a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a "judgment of God" is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale.A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings (gams) between the Pequod and other ships. Chapter 95, however, "The Cassock", referring to the whale's genital organ, was untouched, perhaps because of Melville's indirect language. Probably to accommodate Melville, Bentley inserted a half-title page in the first volume only, which reads "The Whale; or, Moby Dick". Buell sees a double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt". Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings, coincidings, and leewardings.

Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads". Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850.The second most important whaling book is Frederick Debell Bennett, A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from the Year 1833 to 1836 (1840), from which Melville also took the chapter organization, but in a lesser degree than he learned from Beale. American artist David Klamen has cited the novel as an important influence on his dark, slow-to-disclose paintings, noting a passage in the book in which a mysterious, undecipherable painting in a bar is gradually revealed to depict a whale.