Call Him Ishmael

July 14, 2025

In Moby-Dick we have for a main character Ishmael, a literate and educated young man, clearly of good stock — you can tell by the way he speaks — who chooses to join a whaling ship out of a sense of adventure. He stands in stark contrast to the rest of the crew, for whom whaling is merely a profession, and not a particularly glamorous one at that; many of them are from Nantucket, where the “choice” of going a-whaling is practically made for them at birth. Ishmael is like a man who travels to Pennsylvania out of a passion for coal-mining.

Ishmael’s desire here is to see the world in person, rather than read about it in books. He derides those who attempt to study whales by reading accounts or investigating skeletons — to his mind, the only true way to learn is through direct experience. Yet, the scholarly nature of his pursuits mean that he is always viewing his subject from a distance. In this sense, he is not a whaler, but an anthropologist.

This characterizes almost all of Herman Melville’s seafaring protagonists. Not content to merely live life at sea, they must observe and describe that life, and further, ascribe meaning to it. His first novel, Typee, for example, does not merely describe the lifestyle of the Polynesian natives, but attempts to reckon with their philosophy.

Melville’s earlier novels have almost no dramatic elements: there is no concrete plot, nor do any of his characters have much development or motivation. Once he gets them to where they need to go — either on or off a boat — they’re just left to live and breathe in their new surroundings. The exotic nature of these surroundings, combined with the personable and humorous narration, are what serve to interest the reader. These are novels with a premise, but not a plot.

Moby-Dick is different. This is the point at which Melville begins to actively incorporate Shakespeare’s influence into his work. This is evident in the language, and the affluence of classical allusions, but it’s most evident in the character of Ahab, who, after much foreshadowing and mystery, finally appears midway through Ishmael’s voyage upon the Pequod.

It’s notable that Ishmael himself does not soliloquize — he’s too real, too modern. The soliloquizing is left to the more classical, archetypal Ahab. Captain Ahab, unlike Ishmael, is not a real person. He does not dispassionately share his thoughts with the reader: instead, he performs them. Ishmael is directly writing to us, but Ahab is performing for no one in particular. While Ishmael dissects and analyzes, Ahab never loses sight of the poetic whole. He speaks in metaphor and symbol, recognizing that he himself is a symbol. The two characters do not interact; in fact, they rarely share the same page. As Ahab bursts forth in the latter half of the novel, Ishmael sinks into the background.

In Ishmael, we can clearly recognize Melville himself. But in Ahab, we recognize what Melville can not be. Writing novels is the hobby of observers, not actors. As much as Melville was inspired by the liveliness of Shakespeare’s characters, he could not help recognize their incongruity with the form of the novel. Novels are generally psychological; this is why so many are written in the first-person, or at least allow direct access to a character’s internal thoughts. Ahab does not have a psychology; he has a temperament, a spirit, a soul, but he does not have a psychology. For a novelistic character with a psychology, their backstory attempts to explain the person they’ve become. But Ahab’s backstory explains nothing — in fact, it only confuses the matter. We are given a factual history — that Moby-Dick ate his leg and he swore revenge — but this only explains his actions, not his temperament. We are told that he has a young wife and a newborn child at home, but rather than humanize him, this only reveals his inhumanity.

With Ahab’s takeover of Moby-Dick we see a distinct shift in Melville’s literary style. Up until now, the format has always been a protagonist-observer who describes their setting to us in a detached manner. It is only with Ahab that this layer of detachment slips away, and we are invited to live in the moment. The action transforms from the novelistic to something akin to a live theatre experience. The main character is no longer a mere onlooker, but the primary impetus for the action.

We find that when people talk about Moby-Dick, they talk about Ahab, not Ishmael. A lot of people don’t think about Ishmael at all, seeing him as a mere vessel for the narration of Ahab’s tale. This happens a lot with first-person characters; they are often tough to analyze, because they only insert themselves imperceptibly between the reader and the story. It’s like trying to understand a camera lens by looking at the photograph it has taken; we have to reverse-engineer their presence. This problem is also present in another great American novel, The Great Gatsby. The emotional crux of the novel is the story of Jay Gatsby, but the Gatsby we are shown is not The Jay Gatsby; it is Nick Carraway’s Jay Gatsby. And so we must ask, what is it about Nick that makes him want to tell this story?

In the same way, we must ask what Ahab means to Ishmael. We mentioned that Ishmael wants to live life in person, rather than merely observing it. He wants to feel passion, and convert his passion into action. At the beginning of the novel, Ishmael is depressed. It is a “damp, drizzly November in [his] soul.” He walks around the street wanting to knock people’s hats off. This is all conveyed in such a comical fashion that it’s easy to miss the fact that Ishmael is suicidal: bringing up the rear of funerals and staring longingly into coffin warehouses. “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon the sword; I quietly take to the ship.” Signing up for a whaling voyage is an alternative (or an equivalent) to killing himself.

Ishmael wants some sort of purpose. He’s drawn to the sea as an escape from the mundanity of city life. On land, the most he can get worked up about is cetological debates and abstract philosophies. At sea, he can be a part of something more direct and tactile. But even as he gets to sea, Ishmael finds it hard to adjust. He still feels the need to provide a full classification of whale species, and a broad overview of the daily workings of a whaling ship. He’s a part of the crew, but he’s not part of the journey. As one of the lower-ranking members, his contribution is minimal, and his autonomy even less.

And so, Ishmael finds himself describing the men he sees around him. The mates, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. The exotic harpooners, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Davoo. And finally, Ahab, once he emerges from his mysterious hibernation. These are characters with clear purposes and desires. These are characters who can soliloquize and dramatically debate. They have concrete positions, and they don’t really change.

In a sense, Ishmael is watching a Shakespeare play. But in another sense, Ishmael is creating this play. We have to note the sheer incongruity of these personages and their setting. In Shakespeare, it is the nobility who get to speak in verse and pontificate on high-minded topics, while the lower-classes trundle around, stuck in everyday prose. But here we are, in the maritime equivalent of a coal mine, as an uneducated Nantucket captain makes speeches like:

“But if the great sun move not itself, but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.”

How can we reconcile this incongruity? The solution is to recognize that this is not Ahab speaking — this is Ishmael. This is the exact kind of philosophical observations and metaphors that Ishmael has been making since the beginning of the book, now transplanted into the mouth of Ahab. Ishmael can’t live his own adventure; he doesn’t have the spiritual or material capacity. Instead, he immerses himself in the lives of others, and makes of them heroes of his own design. Thus, Moby-Dick is not a pastiche of Shakespeare; it is a conscious evocation of Shakespeare as the refuge of those not satisfied with the real world, as searching for a more-than-real dramatic world — the world of literature.

By inserting the Shakespearean into an otherwise realistic novel, Melville creates something altogether new and modern; and, importantly, psychological. Because the novel is inviting us deep into the psyche of Ishmael, and by nature of identification, into that of the author himself. Ishmael is real, and this makes his unreal creations real also. We are not attempting to lose ourselves in a fantasy, as when watching a stage; instead, we are watching another person’s fantasy play out before our eyes. And by experiencing their fantasy, we come to understand this person, this real person — whether we think of him as Ishmael or Melville, it doesn’t matter — on a deeper level. This is why it’s stated in the novel itself that this story is not an allegory. Allegory is impersonal and abstract. Shakespeare does allegory, as does the Bible. These are works that revel in anonymity. Not knowing who Shakespeare is is actually what makes Shakespeare possible. In a sense, he is everyone, as his range suggests. But Melville/Ishmael is not everyone — far from it. Melville/Ishmael is a particular person. He is an Individual.

So, when people ask why Ishmael takes a break in Chapters 103-105 to discuss the size of a whale’s skeleton and whether or not whales can possibly go extinct, it’s because that’s the kind of guy he is. We are being shown that, even this late in the game, Ishmael is still stuck in the scholarly, detached attitude that brought him to this point. He’s not engaged in whaling; he’s engaged in meta-whaling. He’s dealing with whaling qua whaling. A layman goes out and sees the beautiful flowers; a botanist sees classifications, taxonomies, and characteristics. Ishmael, in a sense, is not going a-whaling at all; he is studying.

Is it poor pacing, in a dramatic sense? Clearly! But we are not dealing with drama here. The literary novel is not a dramatic form. We have theatre and film to take care of that. The novel is not a medium of action, but of contemplation. Ahab is a dramatic character, and thus can only properly exist in this format through the mediation of a contemplative narrator such as Ishmael.

In his next novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Melville attempts to more directly depict a Shakespearean hero (this time evoking Hamlet), and the result is absolute absurdity. The incongruity is apparent throughout the entire work, as the protagonist fluctuates wildly between emotional states, obtains a new backstory midway through the novel, and generally acts in an exceedingly dramatic and confusing manner. While these kind of swings can make sense in drama, they feel utterly out of place in a novel; the nature of prose implies at least a semblance of logical structure. While Pierre is an exciting and fascinating work, its eccentricities make clear the razor-thin line that Moby-Dick is able to walk much more proficiently.

We require Ishmael’s rather innocuous presence to set the stage for Ahab, not only structurally, but thematically. For Ishmael and Ahab are both turning away from the world: one in despair, and the other in anger. Ishmael philosophizes from a distance, while Ahab feels his philosophy — feels it as he feels the loss of his leg. Ishmael’s silent, philosophical resignation finds its loud and blustering counterpart in Ahab’s purposeful march toward destruction. Ahab, despite his soliloquizing, is impossible to understand on his own. It is only through Ishmael’s eyes, through Ishmael’s sympathy, that he makes any sort of sense.

Ishmael is the book’s narrator, but he embodies this role so fully as to become the book’s author. He is the medium by which the world of Moby-Dick comes to life.