Ishmael (Moby-Dick)

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Ishmael is the narrator of and a character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). The only survivor of the Pequod's whaling voyage, Ishmael, grown some years older, tells the story of his experiences. The shaping of his narrative with use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquys, emblemetical readings, is itself one important theme. The development of critical and biographical insights since the 1950s has led scholars to distinguish Ishmael from Melville himself. The name Ishmael sets the stage for a Biblical allegory, the Ishmael from Genesis banished into the desert and Melville's Ishmael wandering upon the sea by contrast. Both Ishmaels, however, experience a miraculous rescue, the one from thirst, the other as the only crewmember rescued from drowning with the sinking Pequod.

Narrator

According to M.H. Abrams, Ishmael ranks among the middle category of first-person narration types. Abrams's outer categories are: a narrator who is only "a fortuitous witness," or a narrator who is "the central character in the story." Ishmael, then, is "only a minor or peripheral" character in the story he tells (Abrams cites Nick of The Great Gatsby as another example of this device).[1] "The first Ishmael is the enfolding sensibility of the novel, the hand that writes the tale, the imagination through which all matters of the book pass. He is the narrator."[2] 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."

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.'"[3] Narrator-Ishmael demonstrates "an insatiable curiosity" and an "inexhaustible sense of wonder."[4] This Ishmael must be equated with Melville himself, and Bezanson suggests "we resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael."[5] As the phrase "Ishmael's richly allusive text" indicates, Bezanson even attributes characteristic Melvillean features to the narrator.

Thanks to Joyce and Faulkner, the modern reader of Moby-Dick may easily get used to "the discontinuities in manner and genre."[6] Critic Robert Zoellner sees no breaking down of Ishmael's role as narrator, for if Ishmael can "speculate on Ahab's purposes" in chapter 46, then he can also "imagine a soliloquy" by Ahab.[7] Of the book 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 inistst 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 is "under constant discussion, is itself one of the major themes of the book."[8] Ishmael uses, among other genres and styles, a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, an emblematic reading.[9]

Character

"The second Ishmael," Bezanson insists, "is not the narrator, not the informing presence, but is the young man of whom, among others, narrator Ishmael tells us in his story. 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."[10] A later essay tones down Bezanson's appreciation, as he calls character-Ishmael an innocent "and not even particularly interesting."[11] According to F.O. Matthiessen, the reader would do well not "to forget that the first reason Ishmael gave for going to sea was 'having little or no money in my purse'."[12]

History of criticism

Abrams cites the publication of The Art of the Novel, Henry James's collected prefaces to his various novels, in 1934 as one contribution that made point of view "one of the most prominent and persistent concerns in modern treatments of the art of prose fiction."[13] His list of further reading includes Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction", PMLA 70 (1955). The development of the critical view of Ishmael as a fictional narrator rather than Melville under another name falls within this period.

During the early decades of the Melville revival, Ishmael has been confused with Melville, whose works were perceived as straight autobiography by his early biographers. F.O. Matthiessen complained that "most of the criticism of our past masters has been perfunctorily tacked onto biographies" and to expose the "modern fallacy" of the "direct reading of an author's personal life into his works."[14]

In 1948 Howard P. Vincent, in his study The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, had "warned against forgetting thenarrator."[15] 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.[16]

And Ishmael (Old Testament)

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. Melville shapes his allegory to the Biblical Ishmael as follows:

  • Biblical Ishamel is banished to "the wilderness of Beer-sheba," while the narrator of Moby-Dick wanders, in his own words in "the wilderness of waters."[17] In the Bible the desert or wilderness is a common setting for a vision of one kind to another.[18] By contrast, Melville's Ishmael takes to sea searching for insights.
  • In Genesis, Hagar was visited by an angel who instructed her to call her still unborn child Yishma'el, meaning "God shall hear." The prophecy in the name was fulfilled when Ishmael, perishing in the desert, was saved by a miracle: the sudden appearance of a well of water.[19] In Moby-Dick, only Ishmael escapes the sinking of the Pequod, and "that by a margin so narrow as to seem miraculous."[20]

And so the name points to a Biblical analogy that marks Ishmael as the prototype of "wanderer and outcast,"[21] 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.[22]

Actors who have played Ishmael

Ishmael does not appear in the 1930 film adaptation, loosely based on Melville's novel, in which John Barrymore plays Ahab.

External links

Sources

  • M.H. Abrams, "Pont of view," in M.H. Anbrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. ISBN 9780155054523
  • Walter E. Bezanson, "Moby-Dick: Work of Art," in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Second Norton Critical edition, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, W.W.Norton 2002
  • Walter E. Bezanson, "Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream," in John Bryant (ed.) A Companion to Melville Studies, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1986.
  • F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941.
  • Nathalia Wright, Melville's Use of the Bible, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1949.

Notes

  1. ↑ Abrams, 233-4
  2. ↑ Bezanson 2002, 644
  3. ↑ Cited in Bezanson 2002, 645
  4. ↑ Bezanson 2002, 646 and 647
  5. ↑ Bezanson 2002, 647
  6. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 188
  7. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 184
  8. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 185
  9. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 185
  10. ↑ Bezanson 2002, 644
  11. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 185
  12. ↑ Matthiessen, 400
  13. ↑ Abrams, 231
  14. ↑ Matthiessen, xi-xii
  15. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 183
  16. ↑ Bezanson 1986, 184
  17. ↑ Wright, 48
  18. ↑ Wright, 49
  19. ↑ Wright, 48
  20. ↑ Wright, 50-51
  21. ↑ Wright, 47
  22. ↑ Nathalia Wright, "Biblical Allusion in Melville's Prose," in American Literature, May 1940, 187
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