Ishmael (Moby Dick)

Characteristics

Both Ahab and Ishmael are fascinated by the whale, but whereas Ahab perceives him exclusively as evil, Ishmael keeps an open mind. Ahab has a static world view, blind to new information, but Ishmael's world view is constantly in flux as new insights and realizations occur. "And flux in turn ... is the chief characteristic of Ishmael himself." In the chapter "The Doubloon," Ishmael reports how each spectator sees his own personality reflected in the coin, but does not look at it himself. Only fourteen chapters later, in "The Guilder," does he participate in "what is clearly a recapitulation" of the earlier chapter. The difference is that the surface of the golden sea in "The Guilder" is alive, whereas the surface of the doubloon is unalterably fixed, "only one of several contrasts between Ishmael and Ahab."

Ishmael meditates on a wide range of topics. In addition to explicitly philosophical references, in Chapter 89, for instance, he expounds on the legal concept, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, which he takes to mean that possession, rather than a moral claim, bestows the right of ownership.

Biography

Ishmael explains his need to go to sea and travels from Manhattan Island to New Bedford. He is a seasoned sailor, having served on merchant vessels in the past, but this would be his first time aboard a whaling ship. The inn is crowded and he must share a bed with the tattooed Polynesian, Queequeg, a harpooneer who Ishmael assumes to be a cannibal. The next morning Ishmael and Queequeg head for Nantucket. Ishmael signs up for a voyage on the whaler Pequod, under Captain Ahab. Ahab is obsessed by the white whale, Moby Dick, who on a previous voyage has severed his leg. In his quest for revenge Ahab has lost all sense of responsibility, and when the whale sinks the ship, all crewmembers drown, with the exception of Ishmael: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (Job) says the epigraph. Ishmael keeps himself afloat on a coffin until he is picked up by another whaling ship, the Rachel.

And Ishmael (Old Testament)

The name Ishmael is Biblical in origin: in Genesis 16:1-16; 17:18-25; 21:6-21; 25:9-17, Ishmael was the son of Abraham by the servant Hagar. In 16:11-12, the most significant verses for Melville's allegory, Hagar was cast off after the birth of Isaac, who inherited the covenant of the Lord instead of his older half-brother.

Melville shapes his allegory to the Biblical Ishmael as follows:

And so the name points to a Biblical analogy that marks Ishmael as the prototype of "wanderer and outcast," the man set at odds with his fellows. Wright says that all Melville's heroes—with the exception of Benito Cereno and Billy Budd—are manifestations of Ishmael, and four are actually identified with him: Redburn, Ishmael, Pierre, and Pitch from The Confidence-Man.

Roles in the novel

Critics have come to different conclusions on the question whether the protagonist is Ishmael or Ahab. The novel, says critic Walter Bezanson, is not so much about Ahab or the White Whale as it is about Ishmael, who is “the real center of meaning and the defining force of the novel.” According to M.H. Abrams, however, Ishmael is "only a minor or peripheral" participant in the story he tells (Abrams cites Nick of The Great Gatsby as another example of this device).

The reader is not told how long after the voyage Ishmael begins to tell his adventure, the second sentence's "some years ago" being the only clue. This Ishmael, is only the first of two Ishmaels, suggests Bezanson. He is the narrator, “the enfolding sensibility of the novel” and “the imagination through which all matters of the book pass.” He shapes his narrative with use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, emblematical readings. The “second Ishmael," continues Bezanson, is the young man who, among others, is the subject of the story "narrator Ishmael" tells us. He is “simply one of the characters in the novel, though, to be sure, a major one whose significance is possibly next to Ahab’s.” This is “forecastle Ishmael,” or the “younger Ishmael of 'some years ago.'... Narrator Ishmael is merely young Ishmael grown older." From time to time shifts of tense indicate that "while forecastle Ishmael is busy hunting whales narrator Ishmael is sifting memory and imagination in search of the many meanings of the dark adventure he has experienced." In a later essay, Bezanson calls character-Ishmael an innocent "and not even particularly interesting except as the narrator, a mature and complex sensibility, examines his inner life from a distance, just as he examines the inner life of Ahab.... "

John Bryant points out that Ishmael's role changes as the novel goes on, with even a “flip-flopping from Ishmael to Ahab.” He observes that the beginning of the book is “comedy” in which anxious Ishmael and serene Queequeg “bed down, get ‘married,’ and take off on a whaling adventure come-what-may.” Then Ahab enters in Ch. 29, and Ishmael does not reappear until Ch. 41. When he returns, Ishmael is no longer the “central character” as in the earlier chapters, but becomes the novel’s “central consciousness and narrative voice.” As his role as a character erodes, says Bryant, “his life as a lyrical, poetic meditator upon whales and whaling transforms the novel once again....” In this section, Ishmael wrestles with the realization that he cannot follow Ahab to a fiery doom but must be content with “attainable felicity,” (Ch. 94) but Ahab then takes over once more.

The narrator explicitly states that he has experienced but not yet fully understood his adventures: "'It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.'" Narrator-Ishmael demonstrates "an insatiable curiosity" and an "inexhaustible sense of wonder." This Ishmael must not be equated with Melville himself, and Bezanson suggests "we resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael." As the phrase "Ishmael's richly allusive text" indicates, Bezanson even attributes characteristic Melvillean features to the narrator, who in the Epilogue, likens himself to "another Ixion".

Of the book it is "frequently said" that Melville did not pay a great deal of attention to point of view, "and of course this is true" in the sophisticated Jamesian sense of the technique. Yet Bezanson insists that it would be a mistake "to think the narrator indifferent to how his tale is told," because the narrator's "struggle" with the shaping of his narrative, "under constant discussion, is itself one of the major themes of the book." Ishmael uses, among other genres and styles, a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, an emblematic reading.

Changing critical views

During the early decades of the Melville revival, Ishmael was often confused with Melville, whose works were perceived as autobiography. The critic F.O. Matthiessen complained as early as 1941 that "most of the criticism of our past masters has been perfunctorily tacked onto biographies" and objected to the "modern fallacy" of the "direct reading of an author's personal life into his works." In 1948 Howard P. Vincent, in his study The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, "warned against forgetting the narrator." Robert Zoellner says that "traditional criticism" argues that Ishmael's role as narrator "breaks down" either when Ahab and Stubb "have a conversation off by themselves" in chapter 29 or else when Ishmael reports "the soliloquy of Ahab sitting alone" in chapter 37.

Actors who have played Ishmael

Trivia