Ishmael: Sounding the Repose of If

• Main Author: Bryant, John
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 1993
• Subjects: White whale
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195077827.003.0010; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52615133/isbn-9780195077827-book-part-10.pdf

Abstract Moby-Dick is a tragedy staged within a comedy, and a drama contained by a meditation. Just as Ishmael projects Ahab out of himself, and Ahab projects the white whale, so does Ishmael’s redemptive geniality frame the demonic impulse that informs Ahab’s dramatic conflict with Moby Dick. This framing technique, which draws upon gothic and tall-tale formulas,1is most directly felt in the rhythmic alternations in the narrative between disintegration and coherence, the pulse of Ahab’s “unsmoothable … seam” (MD, 488) and counterpulse of Ishmael’s “one seamless whole” (492). With these alternating periods of tension and repose, we feel wrapped in the tides of the author’s unfolding consciousness, in which seamless vision and fracturing realities enact a circular discourse. For Ishmael that circu larity—and circles more than whiteness are the novel’s dominant symbol—is a comfort; for Ahab, despair. Melville gives the more solid beat in this rhythmic give-and-take to Ishmael’s repose, and finally this recurring comic beat is the narrative’s organizing principle.