Die London Review of Books, für solche Sätze:

Moby-Dick avoids anything too obvious by devising the white whale as an enormous marine pallet, which is then stacked with anxieties about God and nature and human ambition, offset from time to time by Ishmael's debunkings ('Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech?'). Even so, the story remains a contest between Moby Dick, the thinking man's whale, in his 'pyramidal silence', and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale's man.