Ishmael is the narrator (and arguably the protagonist) of the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by U.S. author Herman Melville. It is through his eyes and experience that the reader experiences the story of the ship Pequod, and the fight between Captain Ahab and the white whale. He is a central character in the action in the early part of the novel, essentially fulfilling all the requirements of being a conventional protagonist. After the Pequod leaves Nantucket, he increasingly recedes into the background as a commentator, with his voice approaching that of an omniscient narrator at times, able to see into all parts of the ship and into the private motivations of other characters.
Ishmael introduces himself in the opening sentence of the novel with the well-known line "Call me Ishmael." The name Ishmael is Biblical in origin: in Genesis, Ishmael was the son of Abraham by the servant Hagar, who was cast off after the birth of Isaac, who inherits the covenant of the Lord instead of his older half-brother. In the Islamic tradition, with which Melville was certainly much less familiar, Ishmael is an heir of Abraham. In Moby-Dick Ishmael does not comment on the significance of his own name, but he does refer to himself by that name several times in the book.
Ishmael provides little about his personal background before his decision at the beginning of the novel to journey to Nantucket, Massachusetts to enlist as a sailor on a whaler. There is evidence in the text to suggest that he was formerly a school-teacher who left that life of theory to pursue the more practical life at sea. At the beginning of the novel, he is an experienced seaman who has not previously served on a whaler but in the merchant marine service (an experience that is ridiculed by the owners of the Pequod when he approaches them to sign on). He begins the novel in the first chapter wandering through Manhattan in the dreariness of November with dark thoughts suggesting nearly suicidal tendencies: pausing before coffin houses and following funerals. His primary reason for going to sea, he suggests, is to break out of this depressive cycle and obsession with death. Ishmael tends to brood and think his way through things, going so far as to describe himself as a philosopher in The Mast-Head. Ishmael, while seemingly rejecting the arts, does confess that he is—or at least was at one point—a poet.
Ishmael doesn’t talk very much about himself in the story even though he is so involved in it. His decision to become a whaler is mentioned to be his version of suicide; meaning men who ship out to sea are “lost to the world.” Despite the fact that he seems well educated due to his frequent rants on subjects such as art, anatomy, and geology, he calls the ship his Yale College and his Harvard. Ishmael represents the contradiction between the story of Moby-Dick and the setting of it. The fact that he is so well-educated would mean that he is the only one capable of narrating the story because of his background. He tends to have deep moments of depression where he compares himself to nothing more than a common sailor. The biblical connotation of Ishmael actually goes much deeper than most realize. The biblical Ishmael was banished into the wilderness by his father Abraham; Melville's Ishmael seems also to be banished, with nowhere to go, getting through it all by sheer luck. In the Bible, God helps Ishmael survive in the wilderness, just as God helps in the book, all religious views aside. Throughout the story that Ishmael tries to convince the reader that a whale chasing a whaling ship really isn’t as farfetched as it may seem. In an extensive discourse on the biology of whales, he makes it seem almost plausible that a whale can be malevolent and know it is being hunted. In his view, the whale possesses a nearly human consciousness and is bent on killing Ahab. All in all, Ishmael's role in the book does not go much beyond that of narrator.