I believe that the book is able to get its credit after the antebellum period in America, because, much of the reason why the book had failed was because much of our nation’s foundation relied on the very things Melville attested against in the big book. This left the American conservatives offended and the British audiences to be spectators amused by the entertainment it brought to them. Majority of both sides ruled out the big book as excessive and not moving. It is mentioned that only some critics saw the significance of Moby Dick for what it embodied to them at a critical time: a social commentary that is striking because it is broad and extensive, confronting multiple perspectives of an underlying issue without constructing the focal point down to one commentary.

Reigel indirectly points out this marveled technique of Melville, stating that, “From what that ‘Herman Melville’ character is which has been discovered by recent critics, and its meaning to modern life, one must go to the works and autobiographies”(Reigel 200). This book is not just action packed and blood-gore filth entertainment that some Americans and British readers thought this was; but, it is a book that memorializes and fossilizes human record and tragedy in order to preserve the real horror of humanity in the world. The author does not completely remove himself from the destruction, but being seen as a “character” in his own novel, he alters how novels are merely narrative for narrative’s sake; he represents and volunteers as the active agent in American society. One can be acceptive of this meditation, or one can be instantly offended by its general exploitation in all accounts and write off this novel as excessive. Whatever the case, many critics during the 19th century have kept this book as a way to pave the American consciousness that is direct and instigative, moving the era where post-modernism emerges.