Ishmael (Moby-Dick)
Ishmael | |
---|---|
Moby Dick character | |
Created by | Herman Melville |
In-universe information | |
Gender | Male |
Occupation | Schoolmaster, sailor, oarsman, whaler |
Nationality | American |
Ishmael is a character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), which opens with the line "Call me Ishmael." He is the first-person narrator of much of the book. Because Ishmael plays a minor role in the plot, early critics of Moby-Dick assumed that Captain Ahab was the protagonist. Many either confused Ishmael with Melville or overlooked the role he played. Later critics distinguished Ishmael from Melville, and some saw his mystic and speculative consciousness as the novel's central force rather than Captain Ahab's monomaniacal force of will.
The Biblical name Ishmael has come to symbolize orphans, exiles, and social outcasts. By contrast with his namesake from the Book of Genesis, who is banished into the desert, Melville's Ishmael wanders upon the sea. Each Ishmael, however, experiences a miraculous rescue; in the Bible from thirst, in the novel from drowning.
Characteristics
Both
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, like Melville, first worked as a school teacher before securing a position on a merchant vessel. After several voyages in the merchant service, he decides to sail as a green hand on a whaling ship, leaving from Nantucket.
Ishmael first travels from
Family
The only family Ishmael mentions include an unnamed stepmother and an uncle, Captain (John) D'Wolf. John D'Wolf, in reality, was Melville's uncle, having married his paternal aunt Mary. Ishmael, writing the narrative of the book as an older man, also implies in Chapter 35 that he's a father ("we fathers being the original inventors and patentees...").
Ishmael (Old Testament)
The name
Melville shapes his allegory to the Biblical Ishmael as follows:
- Biblical Ishmael is banished to "the wilderness of Beer-sheba", while the narrator of Moby-Dick wanders, in his own words, in "the wilderness of waters."[5] In the Bible, the desert or wilderness is a common setting for a vision of one kind or another.[6] 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". This prophecy was fulfilled when Ishmael, perishing in the desert, was saved by a miracle: the sudden appearance of a well of water.[5] In Moby-Dick, only Ishmael escapes the sinking of the Pequod, which is described as "that by a margin so narrow as to seem miraculous."[7]
- In direct translation from the Hebrew Bible about Ishmael: "His hand in all, and the hand of all in him."
The name further points to a Biblical analogy that marks Ishmael as the prototype of "wanderer and outcast",[8] the man set at odds with his fellows. Nathalia Wright says that all Melville's heroes—with the exception of Benito Cereno and Billy Budd—are manifestations of the Biblical Ishmael, and four are actually identified with him: Redburn, Ishmael, Pierre, and Pitch from The Confidence-Man.[9]
Critical views
During the early decades of the
Views also differ as to whether the protagonist is Ishmael or Ahab.
Bezanson argues that there are two Ishmaels. The first is the narrator, "the enfolding sensibility of the novel" and "the imagination through which all matters of the book pass." 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. The "second Ishmael", continues Bezanson, is "forecastle Ishmael", or the "younger Ishmael of 'some years ago.'... Narrator Ishmael is merely young Ishmael grown older." Forecastle Ishmael is "simply one of the characters in the novel, though, to be sure, a major one whose significance is possibly next to Ahab's." From time to time there are shifts of tense to 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."[14]
In a 1986 essay, Bezanson calls 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..."[15]
John Bryant points out that as the novel progresses the central character is "flip-flopping from Ishmael to Ahab". 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." After Ahab enters in Ch. 29, Ishmael, who does not reappear until Ch. 41., is no longer the "central character", but 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..." 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.[16]
Narrator-Ishmael demonstrates "an insatiable curiosity" and an "inexhaustible sense of wonder", says Bezanson,[17] but has 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.'"[18] This Ishmael must not be equated with Melville himself: "we resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael."[19] Bezanson does attribute characteristic Melvillean features to the narrator, who in the Epilogue, likens himself to "another Ixion".[20]
Bezanson also insists that it would be a mistake "to think the narrator indifferent to how his tale is told." Earlier critics charged that Melville did not pay a great deal of attention to point of view, "and of course this is true" in Henry James's sense of the technique, yet Ishmael-narrator's "struggle" with the shaping of his narrative, "under constant discussion, is itself one of the major themes of the book." Ishmael deploys among other genres and styles, a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, an emblematic reading.[15]
Actors who have played Ishmael
- Howard Duff in the 1948 NBC Favorite Story radio adaptation in which William Conrad portrayed Ahab.
- Richard Basehart in Moby Dick, a 1956 film adaptation in which Gregory Peck plays Ahab.
- Henry Thomas in Moby Dick, a 1998 television miniseries adaptation in which Patrick Stewart plays Ahab.
- Tim Guinee in Animated Epics: Moby Dick, a 2000 animated movie in which Rod Steiger provides the voice of Ahab.
- Terry O'Neill in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a 2003 film based on the comic book of the same name, as the first mate of Captain Nemo.
- Jack Aranson (and 8 other characters) in a 2003 stage adaptation of the book.
- F. Murray Abraham in the 2006 three-part BBC Radio 4 radio play.
- Renee O'Connor plays Michelle Herman, a female counterpart of Ishmael in Moby Dick, a 2010 modern-day film adaptation in which Barry Bostwick plays Ahab.
- Charlie Cox in Moby Dick, a 2011 television miniseries adaptation in which William Hurt plays Ahab.
- Stephen Costello plays Greenhorn, the renamed Ishmael character, in the 2010 opera version by Jake Heggie.
- PJ Brennan as a young man in the 2010 two-part BBC Radio 4radio play.
- Manik Choksi in Dave Malloy's 2019 musical Moby Dick: A Musical Reckoning.
- Jang Ye-na (장예나) as a female interpretation of Ishmael, working alongside other classic literary protagonists in the 2023 video game Limbus Company.
Notes
- ^ "Only I am escaped alone to tell thee" is a tagline repeated in the opening scenes of the Book of Job.
- ^ The coffin had previously been made by the ship's carpenter for Queequeg when the latter was suffering from a severe fever.
Citations
- ^ Sweeney (1975), 94
- ^ Sweeney (1975), 93
- ^ Sweeney (1975), 95
- ^ Mansfield and Vincent (1952), 587
- ^ a b Wright (1949), 48
- ^ Wright (1949), 49
- ^ Wright (1949), 50-51
- ^ Wright (1949), 47
- ^ Wright (1940), 187
- ^ Matthiessen (1941), xi-xii
- ^ Bezanson (1986), 183
- ^ Bezanson (1986), 184
- ^ Abrams (2011), p. 303
- ^ a b Bezanson (1953), 644
- ^ a b Bezanson (1986), 185
- ^ Bryant (1998), pp. 67-68
- ^ Bezanson (1953), 646 and 647
- ^ Cited in Bezanson (1953), 645
- ^ Bezanson (1953), 647
- ^ Herman Melville (1851). "Epilogue". Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers.
References
- ISBN 978-0495898023. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2016-05-27.
- Bezanson, Walter E. (2002). "Moby-Dick: Work of Art". In Parker, Hershel; Hayford, Harrison (eds.). Moby-Dick, or the Whale. New York City: ISBN 9780393972832.
- Bryant, John (1998). "Moby-Dick as Revolution". In Levine, Robert S. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge, England: ISBN 0-521-55571-X.
- Mansfield, Luther S.; Vincent, Howard P. (1952). "Introduction", "Explanatory Notes". Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York City: Hendricks House. ASIN B000KT6EXS.
- Matthiessen, F.O., F.O. (1968) [1941]. American Renaissance. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford, England: ISBN 978-0195007596.
- Quick, Tom (1994) [1851]. "Explanatory Notes". Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York City: Penguin Books. ASIN B00BR5GVAK.
- Sweeney, Gerard M. (1975). Melville's Use of Classical Mythology. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi. ISBN 978-9062032587.
- Wright, Nathalia (1969). Melville's Use of the Bible. Durham, North Carolina: ISBN 978-0374987787.
External links
- Moby-Dick Chapter 1: Loomings — First (numbered) chapter of Moby-Dick, introducing Ishmael.
- Librivox: Moby Dick Audiobook - Public Domain Audiobook