Character Analysis 

Ishmael
The narrator is an observant young man from Manhattan, perhaps even as young as
Melville was (twenty-one) when he first sailed as a crew member on the American
whaler Acushnet. Ishmael tells us that he often seeks a sea voyage when he gets to
feeling glum. Four times he has sailed in the merchant service (so he may well be in his
mid-twenties or older). This time he has a yearning for a voyage on a whaling ship.
Thus we have a story — because of Ishmael's desire for a whaling venture, his keen
observation, his ability to spin a yarn, his ability to grow and learn, and his unique
survival. If Ishmael doesn't live, we have no story.

Ishmael probably is a more interesting narrator because he is a loner by nature. This

allows him further objectivity and a freedom of evaluation that more involvement might
dissuade. Melville frequently employs biblical allusions as keys to understanding in the
novel, and he does so here. The biblical Ishmael (Genesis 16:1-16; 21:10 ff.) is
disinherited and dismissed from his home in favor of his half-brother Isaac. The name
suggests that the narrator is something of an outcast, a drifter, a fellow of no particular
family other than mankind. Ishmael confirms his independent ways by telling us that he
seeks no special rank aboard ship and would not want to be either a cook or a captain;
he says he has enough responsibility just taking care of himself. Ishmael speaks of no
family or even a last name. This is consistent with the ending of the book in which only
Ishmael survives, picked up by the whaling ship Rachel, which, searching after its own
missing children, finds only "another orphan" (Epilogue).

Ishmael's isolation makes his one real friendship, with the Polynesian harpooner
Queequeg, all the more important. Part of Ishmael's appeal as a narrator is that he is an
open-minded character who is capable of change and growth. When he first meets
Queequeg, in a bed they share at the Spouter-Inn, Ishmael is terrified. He sees the
South Seas islander as a stereotypical "heathen" and fears that he is about to be killed
by a cannibal. Just the opposite is true. Ishmael soon learns that Queequeg is one of
the finest men he has ever known — caring, kind, generous, loyal, courageous, and
wise. Together, they explore the rich possibilities existing in diversity. Ultimately, it is
this acceptance that indirectly saves Ishmael's life.

The “Epilogue,” which reveals that Ishmael is the Pequod’s lone survivor, begins with an epigraph from
Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” We discover that not only did he survive the wrecking of
the Pequod and the subsequent vortex created by 58 the suction of the sinking ship, but that it was
Queequeg’s coffin, sealed up and made into a lifebuoy earlier on in the narrative, that he floated upon.
The sharks, which had been such a ferocious force in the novel, “glided by as if with padlocks on their
mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks” (427). Ishmael is saved the following day by
the ship the Rachel, with whom the Pequod had met a few days previous, searching for the captain’s
lost son. After such a journey, the epilogue shows definitively that Ishmael was saved because he was
elected, chosen by God – and chosen by Moby Dick – for salvation (not by luck or chance, as Herbert has
suggested). First, the entire crew of the Pequod dies, either from the sinking of the ship, by Moby Dick
directly, or by the sharks and sea-hawks (since there were other men in the water besides Ishmael), yet
Ishmael is kept safe from all of those threats. Second, the only way he is able to stay alive is by being
buoyed up by the coffin-turned-life-buoy, an item that ended up hanging on the back of the ship as a
spare life-buoy by a mere afterthought; the item was predestinated to be used to help Ishmael survive,
yet no one knew it at the time. Third, Ishmael’s evocation of the epigraph from Job likens him with the
escaped messengers from Job, those who survived calamity to report back to Job with the recount of
God’s devastation and his losses. Ishmael, like the wedding guest of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
is a sailor who survived only to be burdened with a tale to tell (and, as we have seen in the narrative, he
has told the tale of Moby Dick again and again). Fourth, Ishmael is saved by the Rachel, “that in her
retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan” (427). Rachel was an Old
Testament matriarch; Rachel is also symbolic of the nation of Israel as a whole, and the reference
loosely ties to Jeremiah 31:15: “’A voice is heard in Ramah, / lamentation and 59 bitter weeping. /
Rachel is weeping for her children; / she refuses to be comforted for her children, / because they are no
more.’” The context is prophecy to the nation of Israel, whose children are “no more” because they
have been carried away to the Babylonian exile, yet Jeremiah is prophesying that someday the land and
the people will be restored. Ishmael’s reference of being one more orphan taken in by the Rachel is not
only saying that he was found by the nation of Israel, the root of the church, and adopted in as a son to
a spiritual family, but he could also be echoing Christ’s promise in John 14:18 that “I will not leave you as
orphans; I will come to you.” Therefore, Ishmael was divinely saved from life-threatening peril not only
to be adopted into a spiritual family but also, like Jonah, to be saved in order to bring a message to
others.

……..
Thus, when I refer to the novel's autobiographical narration, I mean particularly the autobiographical
consciousness which comprises the shore chapters, and the later chapters that weave Ishmael's
speculative voice around the dramatic action of Ahab's tragedy. Here, what Merleau-Ponty said of
Montaigne could equally be said of Ishmael: they each place a "consciousness astonished at itself at the
core of human existence" 28 (203). It is this interrogative consciousness which unites the shore chapters
with the speculative chapters which often attempt to look at the whale from every possible vantage
point. These speculative chapters are quite evidently searching in character, but the shore chapters
establish the beginnings of this seeking in Ishmael. Montaigne sums up the quality of this form of
consciousness quite succinctly: When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or
weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities.
It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing
forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits;
its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt, and uncertainty. (368) While this description applies
to Ishmael's speculative chapters more generally, it also corresponds to the direction of his soul from
the moment we meet him. Moby-Dick begins anchored in the personal, yet simultaneously eyes the
distant and unknown. When Ishmael says he "love[s] to sail forbidden seas" (22), he captures something
of his very consciousness. Ishmael attempts to read himself through his personal experience, and thus
his own being is portrayed more properly as a becoming. Perhaps the most fundamental paradox of an
autobiographical endeavor is the question of closure. In purporting to give an account of one’s life, even
as that life is still necessarily being lived, it would seem that a true autobiography could only end at the
moment of death. Thus, the great conceit of most autobiography is that it attempts to capture the
wholeness of a life even as this is never possible strictly speaking. Of course, 29 not all autobiography is
naive in this sense.

The novel begins with the often-quoted declaration “Call me Ishmael.” Much has been written about the
nuance of this opening line, about how the narrator immediately conceals a true identity from the
reader and asks to be referred to as a moniker or avatar, perhaps setting him up as an unreliable guide
to the tale he is about to tell. Yet the narrator, the man referring to himself as Ishmael, is telling this
story in hindsight (we know this because he talks about telling a story in a later chapter two years after
the events of MobyDick). Who is “Ishmael,” then, with which this narrator is aligning himself as he tells
his story? The biblical Ishmael was the first-born son of Abraham, who, after receiving a promise of
conceiving an heir in his old age with Sarah, did not trust the prophecy and conceived a child with his
servant, Hagar. He later does conceive a son with Sarah – Isaac, who is God’s chosen – and Abraham
sends both Hagar and Ishmael away from the household. Ishmael, according to prophecy, would
become “a wild donkey of a man, / his hand against everyone / and everyone’s hand against him, / and
he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen” (Gen. 16.12). Ishmael is cast out of his father’s house, denied
an inheritance, and told to make his way alone in the wilderness. Through hints in Ishmael’s story, we
discover that the narrator may have been a member of a well-known family in upstate New York, yet is
now making his way on his own, much like his biblical namesake. Parallels or not, the narrator Ishmael
deliberately aligns his identity with that of the biblical Ishmael, a spiritual outcast without a father or
inheritance. The name “Ishmael” means 19 “Gods hears,” and it is here we have the first inkling that
God’s hand is upon our narrator, even though Ishmael’s mind may be far from him. We discover this
hand of God upon Ishmael (though, again, he does not recognize it as such) in the first chapter,
“Loomings.” Ishmael finds himself “grim about the mouth” (18) in a kind of existential depression, and
knows that a voyage to sea can cure whatever ails him. He states that when he gets into this funk he
needs to get to sea, calling it his “substitute for pistol and ball” (18). Ishmael would rather sail on a ship
than relieve his stress by going into war, yet in the next sentence he compares his going to sea with
Cato’s suicide. Ishmael is not the type of man to admit deep, concerning things about himself, so a witty
defusing to the fact that he could have been suicidal would be in character. If Ishmael is that far gone,
why does he believe that a journey to sea will cure him? Could he be in need of salvation of which he is
not aware? He has received relief before by being near water, by sailing, by getting away from land, but
this time seems different, as he admits to being drawn to sail away by an unseen force: …this the
invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and
influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my
going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
long time ago. (21-22) Ishmael goes on to admit that while he is unsure why exactly “those stage
managers, the Fates” (22) put him down for the part he was to play in the voyage of the Pequod, he
admits that he recognizes “the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill
and discriminating judgment” (22). Ishmael is being drawn into the voyage, which will ultimately lead to
his salvation, by God’s irresistible grace, one of Calvinism’s doctrines.