Well, yes, there's TONS of symbolism through out the book, but that's not what I meant. People certainly understood symbolism back when it was written, that was nothing new, though they may not have gotten it all or realized just how deep he was going with it at the time.

Melville is very loose with structure, it's very experimental in that regard, very modern. There are chapters within the novel that are rendered in the form of a play with characters, dialogue and stage directions. Some chapters run barely a page, while others can be quite long. One of the longer chapters, Cetology, a digression coming right in the middle of the narrative, is mostly just an essay discussing all of the then extent knowledge biologists had about the various whale species. In the 1850's when the book came out, people weren't used to such extravagances in form and structure, or lack there of. I think a lot of people just disregarded it as sloppy or strange. The deeper you get into the novel, the more you'll understand what I mean that it feels very modern in a lot of ways for a book that is more than 160 years old. In its own time I think most people just didn't know what to make of it.