Reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
A Study of Authors, Audiences, and Agendas
I. “Loomings”
In Chapter 104 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ishmael, the first person narrator,
insists that in treating the Leviathan, his book’s “large and liberal theme,” he rises and swells to
meet the whale’s colossal size. His “chirography expands into placard capitals.” He calls for a
condor’s quill and for Vesuvius’s crater as an inkstand. He calls for friends to hold his arms since
the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make
me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the
whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire
on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding the suburbs. (349)
A mighty theme, indeed; but of course, “Strictly speaking,” Kerry McSweeney points out, in
speaking of the Leviathan above, “Ishmael was referring to his work’s principal subject—
whales—rather than to its theme” (9). McSweeney asserts that the “mighty theme” of MobyDick is much more complex than simply a study of whales and whaling, a point which even
Ishmael seems to realize in the passage above. In McSweeney’s reading of the work, MobyDick’s theme is nothing other than the quest for what Ishmael himself calls “the ungraspable
phantom of life,” the pursuit of which leads Ishmael—and has subsequently led critics—to
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“profound explorations of fundamental epistemological, psychological, and metaphysical
questions” (9).
Whether or not one agrees with McSweeney’s assessment of the theme, he certainly
provides a substantial list of the concerns with which Melville and his narrator struggle
throughout the composition of the work: concerns regarding truth, fate and freewill, life and the
afterlife. The list is also a good preliminary summary of those issues that Melville scholars have
addressed in their own readings of Moby-Dick, focusing on Melville’s ideas regarding all of
these issues. To McSweeney’s list I might add those concerns fundamentally aesthetic, literary,
narratorial, political, and scientific. The object of the following discussion of Moby-Dick is to
consider two of the work’s issues in conjunction with one another, one from McSweeney’s list
and one from my own: the issue of the work’s epistemological commentary (that is, evinced
opinion regarding what truths it is possible for humankind to know, and by what venues those
truths are accessible), and the issue of the peculiar narrative style evinced by Ishmael—a not
unrealistic connection since the narrator of every work is the figure who knows or does not know
certain information and will tell us what he can. In the case of this work, I posit that Ishmael’s
narrative style is tied directly to Melville’s concern with exploring the nature of knowledge and
is in fact a structural example of Melville’s commentary on the issue.
Since the epistemological issues in the work are dependent on what I have called a
“peculiar narrative style,” let me begin by giving a small demonstration of that style. A more
thorough model of Ishmael’s narration will be provided later using the narrative theories of
Wayne C. Booth and Peter Rabinowitz, but for now it is sufficient to give a less detailed
illustration of why the work’s narration is worthy of examination at all. My demonstration here is
supported by a passage from Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds, a study of the narrative modes
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used to present consciousness in fiction. Cohn begins the work by discussing the Greek god
Momus, “critic of his fellow gods and of created reality” (3). Momus “is said to have blamed
Vulcan because in the human form, which he had made of clay, he had not placed a window in
the breast, by which whatever was felt or thought there might easily be brought to light” (3).
Cohn points out that “it is to this myth that Tristram Shandy refers when he sets out to draw his
uncle Toby’s character” (3). Tristram has no such window through which he may accurately
observe the inner workings of his subject, and so he “must go some other way to work” (Cohn
3). Cohn uses the anecdote about the Greek god’s desire for a window to the soul, and of
Shandy’s resignation to work without such insight, as a model for two forms of narration.
Momus’s notion of a window to the soul is suggestive of those omniscient narrators who can
offer such internal observations, who have somehow discovered the window that Momus found
lacking. On the other hand, Shandy’s attempt to draw his uncle’s character without the benefit of
peeping into the man’s soul represents the other model, those “incarnated narrators who inhabit
the fictional reality they narrate” and are limited in regard to the knowledge to which they have
access (4).
When considering the question of which of these two groups Ishmael should fall into as a
narrator, the answer seems obvious: Ishmael seems to be an incarnated narrator who, as well as
serving as the agent through which the story passes, also inhabits the world of the novel and is a
character within his own story. The opening chapter, “Loomings,” establishes his position as a
retrospective narrator retelling autobiographical events, namely of a whaling voyage that he
undertook “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely” (Melville 18). As a character in
the story he tells in retrospect, Ishmael is certainly privy to a great deal of information about the
voyage he describes, information (about whales, about whaling, about events and crew members)
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that he readily shares with the reader. Much of this information comes from his own
observations and experiences—the cetological information, for example, which he goes to great
lengths to acquire for his audience, going even so far as to tattoo measurements of a whale
skeleton onto his arm in order to remember it (Melville 346). On the other hand, some
information comes to the narrator through venues less direct than his own experience, such as the
stories shared between sailors during the Pequod’s several encounters with other whaling ships.
The story featured in Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” for example, comes to Ishmael
through Tashtego, who was told the tale by members of the Town-Ho’s crew (Melville 199-200).
As informed as Ishmael may be, from his own observations or from those of others, there
is nevertheless some information to which he simply could not have access—the thoughts and
emotions of his fellow crewmates, for instance. As an incarnated, first person narrator who
inhabits the story he relates, Ishmael should not be able to look through one of Momus’s magical
windows into the hearts and souls of his companions. Such a window should be closed to him—
but it is not. More than once during the narration Ishmael seem possesses the observational
powers which Cohn attributes to omniscient narrators and uses them to relate the thoughts,
motives, and emotions of the Pequod’s crew. Immediate examples of this are found in Chapters
37 through 39, a series of soliloquy chapters in which readers are given the thoughts first of
Ahab (Chapter 37, “Sunset”), then those of the first mate, Starbuck (Chapter 38, “Dusk”), and
finally those of the second mate, Stubb (Chapter 39, “First Night-Watch”). The stage directions
given at the beginning of chapters 37 and 39 inform the reader that at least in these two cases,
Ahab and Stubb are entirely alone, far from Ishmael’s prying eyes and ears; he certainly could
not have overheard them. The absence of quotation marks in all three of these chapters, though,
encourage one to think that these characters simply cannot be overheard at all, regardless of
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proximity—the absence suggests that the characters are thinking these words rather than
speaking them. Aside from telepathy (a skill which Ishmael, though certainly ambitious, never
vocally aspires to), there is no other means by which he could gather this information.
These incursions into omniscience are not simply mistakes on Melville’s part. That is, he
did not just forget that he was writing the book with a first person, limited narrator and
accidentally include information that his narrator had no way of possessing. The quantity of
examples of these narrative breaks is too plentiful to be anything less than intentional. As I said
above, Chapters 37 up through 39 are ready examples, but they are by no means the only
examples. Ishmael’s shift from being a first person limited narrator to being a seemingly
omniscient narrator occurs so consistently throughout Moby-Dick (I will give more examples as
the discussion progresses) that it cannot be anything other than intentional.
Another possible explanation for the shifts, other than that they are simply a mistake, is to
say that there are two narrators in the work, the limited Ishmael and another nameless, unlimited
narrator. This idea must also be dismissed because Ishmael acts in one other role in the work
which I have not hereto discussed. Let me explain it this way. On the lowest narrative level, the
level of character at which Ishmael is an actor in the narratie, let us say, Ishmael is just another
crew member of the Pequod, no different or more commanding in the text than most characters,
and considerably less than others. At another narrative level, though, on the level of narration,
Ishmael shows himself to be a more dominant presence—he is the narrator, the mind that retells
the tale. At this point, it is perhaps possible that there are two narrators. Though such a choice
would be uncommon in fiction during Melville’s time, there is nothing keeping Melville from
employing just as many narrators as there are characters in the book (Faulkner does this in the
twentieth century with his As I Lay Dying). After all, we might think, on the next level up is the
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author, Melville, the hidden god of the work who can do whatever he wants. If he wishes to
employ both a limited and an unlimited narrator in his book, he can do so, and the explanation
for such an action may be nothing more than whim rather than anything of any significance.
This is not the case, however, because there is a level between narrator Ishmael and author
Melville that must be taken into account: Ishmael, as well as being a character and narrator of, is
also, at a particular narrative level, the work’s author.
That Ishmael is the author of Moby-Dick, at least within the fictional world in which the
events of the novel take place, is not as ridiculous as it may sound at first. Epistolary novels are
examples of the same device: an author relinquishing authority within the world of his story and
making his characters responsible for the produced texts—in these instances, responsible for
writing the letters. Other kinds of novels, such as Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, employ texts
taken from the fictional journals or diaries of characters—in the case of Wuthering Heights, the
whole tale, even those parts initially narrated by Nelly, are ultimately written down by the
character who might be considered the work’s fictional author, Mr. Lockwood. In Moby-Dick,
Ishmael is just such an author, penning the tale right below Melville on the narrative ladder. He
refers to himself as the author several times in the work. Such a passage has already been given
above from Chapter 104. Here Ishmael speaks of “penning my thoughts,” of being one of those
writers “that rise and swell with their subject,” and of producing a “mighty book” by choosing a
“mighty theme” (349). In passages where Ishmael does not speak directly of being the author of
the book, he refers to parts of his story as chapters. For example, in Chapter 23, by beginning the
“The Lee Shore” with a phrase as simple as “Some chapters back . . .,” Ishmael reveals that he is
not simply reciting a tale to a listening audience, but writing it down, and even organizing it into
a multi-chaptered book form. He is very aware of himself as the author of a written story. While
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Ishmael himself may not call that story Moby-Dick (is the other author, Melville, who
commandeers Ishmael’s story and gives it a title), it is nevertheless the story we find in MobyDick.
Arguing that Ishmael is the work’s fictional author is another way of saying that there
cannot be a second narrator more privileged than Ishmael because that second narrator, the
omniscient narrator, would then himself be a creation of the book’s author, Ishmael. This brings
the issue around in a circle, right back to the problem of Ishmael having knowledge he is not
privileged to have. No, there is only one narrator, Ishmael himself, and since Ishmael’s dual
status as author and narrator prevents readers from dismissing the narrative shifts as Melville’s
mistakes or his pointless experiments, we are encouraged to think that these narrative
peculiarities are significant characteristics of Ishmael’s storytelling.
Through the blending of Cohn’s two models of narration as shown above, Melville
demands that attention be paid to the narration of Moby-Dick. A number of questions then
immediately arise. How is it that Ishmael is able to give information he does not possess (he
gives every indication that this is to be accepted as a true story, and yet he seems to invent
information)? Or, if he does not possess it, why does he invent it? Additionally, at the highest
narrative level, outside of the novel and in the real world, why is it that Melville allows Ishmael
to use these peculiar methods? It is my assertion that since two authors are controlling the
unfolding story of Moby-Dick, both Ishmael and Herman Melville, there are also two different
authorial intentions operating within the work and thus two explanations for these narrative
shifts. The relationship of these two authorial intentions unites the issues already under
examination in this study: the peculiar narrative style and the issue of epistemology.
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I will give a brief summary of the two authorial agendas here before treating them more
fully in the body of this discussion. One need not look far for a description of Ishmael’s
authorial agenda. Walter E. Bezanson accurately describes this agenda in his “Moby-Dick: Work
of Art.” Bezanson discusses what he calls the two Ishmaels who inhabit Moby-Dick, one as
character and the other as narrator/author. He says “The first Ishmael is the enfolding sensibility
of the novel, the hand that writes the tale,” the author whom I have already mentioned (Melville
644). The second Ishmael is, of course, the character who went on the Pequod “some years
ago,” the character who chased whales and kept watch in the forecastle (Melville 18). When
considering why the first, older Ishmael wants to write a book about his experiences on the
voyage, Bezanson says that old Ishmael writes “the adventure of young Ishmael as a story
already fully experienced. Experienced, but not yet fully understood” (Melville 644). Bezanson
asserts that it is to understand his experiences aboard the Pequod that Ishmael writes—he writes
to understand the motives of captain Ahab, who led his crew to destruction; to understand the
white whale who seemed to so incense the madness of Ahab; to understand his own, lonely
survival; and, above all, to understand the metaphysical powers that operated behind all of these
events, directing the course and the destiny of the ship and crew. For it seems there is no doubt
in Ishmael’s mind that it was a metaphysical force, perhaps fate, which sunk the Pequod and
which decreed that he alone would survive to tell the tale. Ishmael says as much in the first
chapter. When considering why he chose to go to sea as a whale hunter rather than as a merchant
sailor, he says he cannot explain, but that “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” (22). He adds that “doubtless, my going on this
whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long
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time ago” (22). Ishmael also speaks here of his experience aboard the Pequod as a dramatic role
that he had no choice but to play, because “those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this
shabby part of a whaling voyage” while also tricking him into believing that he performed his
role because of “a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment”
(22).
While young Ishmael did not suspect that fate commanded his experiences aboard the
Pequod at the time of the actual events detailed in Moby-Dick (at that time he still believed he
sailed under Ahab because of his “own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment”), the
notion that fate controlled him is his interpretation of events in the years since his voyage. Now,
sitting down at his desk to write the book, Ishmael says that he believes that “now that I recall all
the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly
presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did . . .”
(22). The text of Moby-Dick, then, becomes his chance to record his new realizations about “all
the circumstances” and his awareness of the “springs and motives.” The notion that fate
commands the actions of Ahab and the crew runs throughout the book, and it does so because
Ishmael now believes that such is the truth. Writing the book is also Ishmael’s way of identifying
those “various disguises” that run throughout his experience. For instance, now that he retells the
tale, he realizes that the name of the keeper of the Spouter Inn, Peter Coffin, and the name of the
inn itself where he first stays in New Bedford, may be significant. “Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather
ominous in that particular connexion, thought I” (24). Again on Nantucket, at the Try Pots Inn,
he notices another omen: a construction outside the building that resembles two gallows, “one
for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing my
first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whaleman’s chapel; and here a gallows!” (66-
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67). It may be that Ishmael noticed these signs as young Ishmael, first going through the events,
but it seems more likely that it is older Ishmael who notices them in recollection and draws
metaphysical conclusions from their presence to support his authorial agenda, which is to present
readers with his interpretation of the Pequod’s journey as a predestined voyage.
It is here that we notice the issue of epistemology coming to bear. It seems to be a
characteristic of Ishmael’s personal epistemological notions that metaphysical knowledge can be
accessed by the observation (or I will most often employ the word reading) of physical objects.
As he says in Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” “And some certain significance lurks in all things,
else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher” (331). He reads
the inn signs to come to ominous conclusions, and reads the entire experience of his journey to
insist on the existence of fate. Ishmael does even more reading as the novel progresses.
It is also here that we notice the issue of Ishmael’s narrative shifts. Ishmael’s shift from a
limited, incarnated narrator to an omniscient narrator is neither evidence of his ability to mind
read nor of his access to Momus’s magic window to the soul. It is simply evidence of invention
on his part. I have already mentioned that, in looking back, Ishmael sees through some of the
“various disguises” that fate took in the events, and that in regard to the inn signs he peels the
disguises away, validating his interpretation. Ishmael’s narrative shifts are tricks along that same
order: they are inventions that corroborate his interpretation of the journey as predestined. It
cannot be coincidence that in one of the first large narrative shifts, chapter 37, “Sunset,” the
thoughts Ishmael invents and attributes to Ahab in a soliloquy are partially concerned with a
prophecy that Ahab would lose his leg, immediately adding a predestined atmosphere to all of
the events surrounding the Pequod and its voyage.
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Now that I have described Ishmael’s aim in retelling and reinterpreting the story of the
Pequod, I must briefly describe the agenda of the work’s second author, Melville. I will explore
Melville’s agenda more fully in the second section of this study, but I will say here that
Melville’s aim in writing Moby-Dick is quite the opposite of Ishmael’s. While Ishmael believes
that he can read the physical world to discover the metaphysical meaning of his journey and
record it in his book, Melville criticizes such a belief, insisting that such knowledge cannot be
gathered and certainly cannot be trusted. It is as though Melville and Ishmael are two authors
speaking to two audiences, with the readers of Moby-Dick are members of each audience
instantaneously. I will discuss how such a narrative situation is possible using the work of Booth
and Rabinowitz in the third section of this study, but for now we must take it for granted. While
Ishmael speaks to a narrative audience who he hopes will believe his observations and accept
them and his interpretation as fact, Melville speaks to a different, what Rabinowtiz will call an
authorial, audience, who will believe Melville’s criticisms and reject Ishmael’s observations.
While Ishmael adheres to an epistemological view that allows for certain, metaphysical
knowledge, Melville seems to hold to a view that sees only doubt where Ishmael sees truth.
Before I add detail to my analysis of the issues discussed in this section, I will first give
further background in regard to Moby-Dick as Melville’s instrument for epistemological
commentary. I will do this in Section II, drawing primarily on the study of Kerry McSweeney
mentioned above. In Section III of the study I will return to the issue of narration, providing a
more thorough working model for Ishmael’s narration, using the narrative theories of Booth and
Rabinowitz in an examination of a sample chapter, Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story.” In
Section IV I will then discuss how the observations made in regard to “The Town-Ho’s Story”
can be expanded to describe the narration of the entire work. Finally, in Section V, I will draw
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final conclusions about the relationship between the epistemological and narrative issues found
in Moby-Dick, between the two authorial agendas presented above, and will give surmises as to
why Melville makes the commentary he does by taking into account the epistemological
tradition of America as a whole.
II. “The Doubloon”
I have said that Melville uses Moby-Dick as a whole as a means of communicating his
notions of epistemology. I have yet to prove that the commentary is one which exists throughout
the entire book, but in order to begin a discussion on the issue, there is one chapter, at least,
widely recognized as containing Melville’s comments on epistemology. This is Chapter 99,
“The Doubloon.” Here Ishmael observes several members of the crew approach the golden
doubloon which Ahab has nailed to the ship’s mainmast, a reward for the man who first spots the
white whale. Each crew member pauses before the doubloon and studies the symbols and it, and
then Ishmael gives us several of the crew members’ interpretations of what those symbols
mean—all of them interpretations that support Ishmael’s contention that “some certain
significance lurks in all things.”
As Ishmael describes it, the doubloon has “strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it”
(331). He says that “On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR:
QUITO” and “Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a
flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of
the partitioned zodiac, the sign all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun
entering the equinoctial point at Libra” (332). The first character Ishmael observes approaching
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the coin and reading the symbols is Ahab. Pausing in his pace across the quarterdeck, Ahab
stares at the symbols on the coin, “now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them” (331). This is the
interpretation that Ahab speaks aloud:
There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other
grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm
tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, the
victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab, and this round gold is but the
image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man
in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. (332)
Having observed Ahab’s close study of the coin, Ishmael reports that Starbuck is the
second character to approach the doubloon, curious about what the captain saw there. Starbuck’s
interpretation is quite different from that given by Ahab. Starbuck sees “A dark valley between
three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol.
So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness
still shines a beacon and a hope” (333).
Just as Starbuck was curious about what Ahab was looking at, so too is Stubb drawn by
curiosity to peer at the coin after Starbuck. After expressing his suspicion that there is no
meaning in the coin at all, that “You’ll [the doubloon will] do to give us the bare words and
facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts” (333), Stubb does begin to see a meaning in the
symbols. He focuses on the zodiac signs on the coin where he reads an entire history of the life
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of man in those symbols, beginning with Aries, the lecherous ram who “begets us,” going
through Aquarius, who drowns us. We wind up with Pisces—that is, sleeping with the fishes
(334).
After providing us with Stubb’s thoughts about the doubloon, Ishmael enters Stubb’s
mind, giving us the second mate’s thoughts as he watches other crewmembers approaching the
doubloon. Flask, the third mate, sees nothing in the symbols at all. He sees only a gold coin with
which he could buy several cigars (334). The old Manxman sees a prophecy of the time when
Moby Dick will be encountered; Queequeg compares the signs on the coin with those tattooed on
his body; Fedallah sees something to be worshiped, as he bows before the sun featured on the
doubloon. Pip is the last crew member Ishmael speaks of; rather than providing a specific
interpretation of the symbols, he just comments on the reading of all the other characters as they
draw significance from the coin: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” (335).
Whether or not we dare believe Ishmael and accept that all the characters provided all of
these interpretations—which we probably cannot, since Ishmael is reading Stubb’s mind for a
large portion of the chapter, reporting things spoken in a soliloquy—this chapter does reinforce
what appears to be Ishmael’s notion concerning epistemology. That is, all of these characters are
finding a metaphysical significance in a physical object: the golden doubloon. Whether this
significance is a “certain significance,” that is, a truth, I will discuss later.
While “The Doubloon” is an example of Ishmael’s epistemological views, it is not
sufficient evidence to support the claim that the entire work is in some way concerned with
epistemology. But there is a great deal more reading being done in Moby-Dick than that which is
featured in “The Doubloon.” To remain focused on Ishmael, he reads a number of texts he reads
throughout work. Most notably, perhaps, are the texts he reads to compose the chapters about
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whales and the mechanics of the whaling industry, with subjects ranging from whale anatomy
(Chapters 68, 74-77, 80, 86, 92, 103, for example), whales featured in art (Chapters 55-57),
whales as food (Chapter 65), to descriptions of whaling equipment (Chapters 60, 62-63, 72, 78,
96) and whaling history and tradition (Chapters 14, 82-83). In these chapters, what begin as
more or less objective descriptions about a number of subjects soon evolve into elaborate
metaphors which leave the issues of whales and whaling far behind. It is as though Ishmael is
using the whale as only another text from which he can step off and chase metaphysical
knowledge of life, death, and fate. This method of using the whale is what Ishmael speaks of in
Chapter 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in
Stars,” when he says “With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
spurs, would I could ride the whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens
with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight” (223). Perhaps he
cannot ride the whale straight to heaven, but he certainly can, and does, use the whale to sneak a
peek at the hidden truths of the world.
A number of chapters contain the same pattern in which Ishmael begins by talking about
the whale or whaling and ends by using the leviathan as merely a metaphor for some greater
metaphysical insight. For instance, in Chapter 72, “The Monkey-rope,” Ishmael stands on the
Peqoud’s deck tied to one end of a rope, while Queequeg, dangling over the side of the ship and
cutting into a captured whale, is tied to the other. Ishmael reflects on how dangerous this
situation is, given that if Queequeg should fall into the ocean, so too would he. Ishmael realizes
that “this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most
cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your
banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die”
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(255-56). Ishmael says that by exercising caution, one might avoid these tragedies, but he is
reminded that “handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so,
that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only
had the management of one end of it” (256). In this manner, Ishmael takes a physical object—the
monkey-rope—and uses it to perceive metaphysical knowledge—the interconnectedness of
human life, and, possibly, the ultimate lack of free will in that life.
Other examples fit into the same mold from which “The Monkey-rope” springs. In
Chapter 60, “The Line,” Ishmael discusses the ropes that connect the flying harpoon to the
attacking whale ship. These ropes are coiled harmlessly in the boat when not attached to and
being pulled by a harpooned whale. When a whale does pull on a rope, however, the speed and
violence with which it uncoils is mortally dangerous to the boat’s crew. They must remain
vigilant in order not to be caught around the neck by such a line. Ishmael ends the chapter saying
that “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is
only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle everpresent perils of life” (229).
My final example comes from Chapter 68, “The Blanket,” in which Ishmael describes the
layer of blubber that enfolds the whale’s body and allows him to survive in both warm and cold
climates. From this feature of the whale Ishmael does not see a characteristic that already exists
within humankind, but rather a way of life he would have man adopt—“the rare virtue of a
strong individual vitality” (247). Ishmael says, “Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the
whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among the ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being
of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s,
and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thing own” (247).
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Ishmael does not explain how such a lifestyle or state of mind might be achieved, but he
certainly praises it and uses the text of the whale to show its benefits.
Up to this point, I have only focused on one reader in Moby-Dick in order to argue that
the work is largely concerned with issues of epistemology, but Ishmael is certainly not the only
reader, and the doubloon and the whale are not the only texts. Kerry McSweeney points out
many more readers and many more texts than have already been mentioned here. McSweeney
says, “Of course, Ishmael is not alone in his belief that natural facts are meaningful. In their
different way almost all the characters in Moby-Dick share the same faith” (38-39). At the lowest
level, McSweeney points out that the entire crew is interested in reading signs and portents, and
he points to Ishmael’s comment regarding the crew just before Moby Dick is finally sighted:
“Now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
sight” (McSweeney 39). McSweeney comments on interpretations by other characters as well:
Starbuck, the first mate of the Pequod, is also inclined to superstition, but in his
case it “seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance.
Outward portents and inward presentiments were his.” (39)
Father Mapple, the other leading Christian in Moby-Dick, finds a “two-stranded
lesson” (that is, two levels of symbolic meaning) in the biblical story of Jonah.
(39)
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In Gabriel, the mad sailor from the Jeroboam, the power of spiritual perception
reaches an insane pitch: he regards the white whale as nothing less than “the
Shaker God incarnated.” (39)
But, Ishmael aside, it is Captain Ahab who is the most conspicuous exponent in
Moby-Dick of the principle that there is a meaning in all natural facts. At one
point Ahab insists that all visible objects are but “pasteboard masks”—trivial
phenomenal emblems of the large intangible forces behind them. (39)
To this already long list of texts and readers, still others could be added (Queequeg’s
tattooed body, the painting at the Spouter Inn), but further examples are not needed for us to see
that Moby-Dick can easily be considered a parade of one text after another, a procession of
symbols and of characters who believe in reading these symbols, who believe that a “certain
significance lurks in all things.” That all of the characters seem to agree with Ishmael’s
epistemological view is hardly a surprise. If he is willing to manipulate autobiographical events
in order to fashion them into an understandable interpretation, why should he be unwilling to use
every character as a voice for his own outlook on the proper methods for acquiring metaphysical
knowledge?
If the parade of texts shown above is not yet enough to demonstrate Melville’s interest in
epistemology, McSweeney provides some of Melville’s own remarks on the matter. McSweeney
assures us that epistemology was a subject of paramount importance to Meville. He says that
“Melville’s deepest concern was with ‘visible truth,’ that is, with ‘the apprehension of the
absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though
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they do their worst to him’” (13). The subject was so important to Melville that it appears in
more than one of his books. For example, in his third book, Mardi (Moby-Dick was his sixth),
Melville abandons the purely documentary style featured in his first two books, Typee and
Omoo, and rather than telling a “narrative of facts,” of “unvarnished truth,” he chooses to tell an
allegorical tale in which the pursuit of “visible truth” is the subject (McSweeney 14). When
Mardi fell short of commercial success, Melville returned to the documentary style with Redburn
and Whitejacket, just to pay the bills—“They are two jobs” Melville says, “which I have done for
money” (McSweeney 14)—but he found no pleasure in writing them. With Moby-Dick,
however, Melville returns to the subject of truth which so concerned him. In Moby-Dick, “he was
ultimately to try to write a book that would not be simply a sea narrative based on personal
experience but would also forcefully convey his sense of ‘visible truth’” (McSweeney 15).
Of course, up until now it is not Melville’s sense of “visible truth” which I have been
discussing. All of the texts and readers above have been examples of Ishmael’s sense of “visible
truth,” Ishmael’s epistemological view—that significance can be read in physical symbols. I
have also said at the beginning of this discussion, that Melville’s opinion is quite contrary to
Ishmael’s—that he would argue that “certain significance” cannot be found in these physical
symbols. In order to demonstrate Melville’s differing opinion, I need only go back to those
examples with which I argued Ishmael’s. In “The Doubloon,” for instance, Ishmael’s point of
view on epistemology is illustrated through the readings of the doubloon. One character after
another supports Ishmael’s stated idea that “some certain significance lurks in all things” (331)
by reading the doubloon and discovering knowledge about the universe, God, and mankind. In
this same incident, though, Melville reveals his opposing opinion by the very fact that each of
these characters reads a different or unique meaning into a single unchanging text. A “certain
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significance” cannot lurk in something, or at least cannot be accessed, since each reading
becomes an individual experience and each supposed meaning a relative meaning rather than a
“certain” or inalienable one. Melville might cast his lot in with Stubb, who most closely voices
this idea: “You’ll [the doubloon will, the text will] do to give us the bare words and facts, but we
come in to supply the thoughts” (333). To fit these differing opinions more closely to the
questions raised in the first section of this study, the reason Ishmael allows himself to become
omniscient is to further his own interpretation of events and to provide examples of his own
epistemological view. On the other hand, the reason that Melville allows Ishmael to shift
narration is for the purpose of criticizing Ishmael’s actions and undermining his narrator’s
interpretation and epistemological viewpoint—to “forcefully convey his sense of ‘visible truth’”
by creating a structural example of the subjectivity of meaning found in “The Doubloon.”
Now, my insistence that two different opinions are being voiced in the same chapter at
the same time is based entirely on the assumption that in narrating (and perhaps creating) the
readings of his fellow crewmates, Ishmael is not aware that the different interpretations
undermine his assertion that metaphysical truth can be discovered in earthly symbols. But
perhaps he is aware of this contradiction—McSweeney argues that he is in his study, and others
might agree with his analysis (40-41). I do not, however, because such a realization on Ishmael’s
part contradicts his behavior in the entire novel. If Ishmael fully understands the subjective
nature of the meaning that is read in the doubloon, he would recognize the subjectivity involved
in the reading of any text he reads, but he does not. If he is aware of subjectivity in “The
Doubloon,” he is certainly not aware of it in “The Monkey-rope,” “The Line,” or in “The
Blanket.” He believes his readings of the symbols in these chapters to be conclusive—at least, he
offers no warning to his readers that these are only his interpretations and should be accepted as
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such. In reality, though, the rope, line, and blanket are just more doubloons, more meaningless
texts to which “we come in to supply the thoughts.” No, to say that Ishmael is aware of the
subjectivity of meaning in “The Doubloon” is not to remain true to Ishmael’s character or to the
nature of his other observations. There is a different author’s agenda, Melville’s agenda, which
allows for these indications of subjective meaning to appear in Moby-Dick.
I wish to dicuss one more text, one more doubloon, before moving on to the next section
and picking up the issue of narration once more. This final text is the largest doubloon of them
all, and the text with which this study is primarily concerned: the text of Moby-Dick itself, that is,
the text discussed in the first section—the book written by old Ishmael which contains his
interpretation, his reading, of the events aboard the Pequod.
I have already discussed how this text is no more than Ishmael’s interpretation of events,
his understanding of what occurred on his voyage as having been directed by fate, but in light of
the discussion of the subjectivity of reading above, Ishmael’s agenda must be reiterated. Going
back to the words of Walter E. Bezanson, older Ishmael “recounts the coming adventures of
young Ishmael as a story already fully experienced. Experienced, but not fully understood . . .”
(Bezanson 645). He does not yet fully understand why the Pequod chased the white whale, why
all the crew perished, why he alone survived. A person who had lived through such an adventure,
and such a tragedy, might think of a number of explanations for the events. It could, in all
likelihood, have been one big accident. Ahab may just have been a captain who wanted to chase
a particular whale; it may just have been an accident that in the course of the chase the Pequod
was damaged and the crew killed; it may have been luck that Ishmael survived (indeed, one must
wonder whether Melville would have us consider what kind of retelling of events we might
receive if it had been Starbuck, or even Flask, who had survived to tell the tale). Of course, many
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would not want to believe that those lives were taken, and their own lives saved, because of
accident and luck. Certainly Ishmael does not seem to want to believe that. So, instead of
interpreting events in that way, he sees them all rather as having “formed part of the grand
programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago” (Melville 22). Ahab becomes no
normal captain, but a mad captain, the “Fates’ lieutenant” (Melville 418); and the whale becomes
no ordinary whale, but a mask behind which the malignant forces of the universe reside; and
Ishmael is no average survivor. He is specifically selected by fate, the divinely-chosen
messenger of the story—in the last chapter, when he is afloat alone on the ocean, he is untouched
by any creature that could harm him before his rescue: “The unharming sharks, they glided by as
if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks” (427). This
is perhaps because Ishmael feels only he has the insight necessary to tell the tale. As he says, he
can “see a little into the springs and motives” of fate’s plan (22), and like his crew mate Pip, he
drifted alone on the ocean and saw “God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke to it”
(322). He looks back on events and begins to see omens, such as the two signs at the two inns
mentioned above. He reads the minds of his crew mates (perhaps innocently, as unaware that he
is creating meaning here as he is in the whale chapters), creating their motives. After all, it is
from Ahab’s soliloquy in “Sunset” that we learn he is “madness maddened,” and about the
prophecy which seems to underlie all of the events, thereby rendering Ahab’s pursuit a
predestined adventure rather than a simple revenge narrative (143). At least, this is all how
Ishmael reads the story, how he sees the doubloon, and no doubt he believes his interpretation as
fully as we are led to believed that each crew member believed his different reading of the coin
of great worth nailed to the Pequod’s main mast.
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Melville, however, does not read the doubloon that way and does not accept everything
Ishmael has to say about epistemology and about the events on the voyage. There are signs
throughout to indicate this, as well. I discussed such a sign in regard to the doubloon chapter—
that amid all the reading, readers are reminded that everyone is reading the same text in different
ways, a sign which warns readers not to blindly accept the interpretations offered in all the
chapters preceding and following “The Doubloon.” I will discuss a similar sign in the next
section, as well.
Having established the presence of Melville’s concern with epistemology in Moby-Dick,
it is now time to shift focus slightly and concentrate more fully on the narration of the novel and
continue discussion of how the issue of epistemology relates to Ishmael’s particular narrative
style. The primary purpose of Section III is to provide an explanation of the work’s narration that
accounts for my ideas of the work’s two authors and their two authorial agendas. I will examine
Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” and use the narrative theories of Booth and Rabinowitz to
provide this explanation.
III. “The Town-Ho’s Story”
As promised in the initial section of this study, I will here provide a second way by which
to examine Ishmael’s narrative style. The first method I discussed, using the analogies found in
Dorrit Cohn’s study, works well to describe Ishmael’s shift from a first person incarnated
narrator to an omniscient narrator, as well as his reasons for making this shift—that is, because it
helps him support his interpretation. Now I seek to examine mothe presence of multiple authorial
voices and intentions. I will call upon the ideas of Peter Rabinowtiz and Wayne C. Booth in
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their respective essays “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences” and “Distance and
Point of View.” Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” provides an excellent model with which to
demonstrate these ideas. The story featured there can be examined independently from the events
of the rest of the novel, and, as will be seen in Section IV, the conclusions drawn from such a
miniature examination are easily applied to the entirety of the work.
In Chapter 54 we learn that while sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, an area of the
ocean where “you met more travelers than in any other part,” the crew of the Pequod encounters
the Town-Ho and stops to exchange news (199). As well as giving the Pequod “strong news of
Moby Dick”— a tale of an encounter with the white whale which becomes general knowledge
on the Pequod—,“a secret part of the story” of the Town-Ho is exchanged between the ships’
crews, unknown to either of the two captains or either of the ships’ mates (199). Because of the
events related in this secret story, Ishmael says that “To some the general interest in the White
Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed
obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous inverted visitation of one of those so
called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men” (199). Explaining how
the story came into his possession, Ishmael says it was “the private property of three confederate
white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish
injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so
much of it in that way that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest” (199-200).
This is the story that Ishmael offers to tell his readers, though, “For my humor’s sake,” he
chooses to “preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my
Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn,” thus
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explaining the presence of the questions and comments of Don Pedro and Don Sebastian which
periodically interrupt the story (200).
The story that Ishmael tells is one of a mutiny that occurred aboard the Town-Ho some
years “prior to my first learning of the events which I am about rehearsing to you” (200). The
mutiny came about because of “the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Nantucketer, and
the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo” (201).
Steelkilt, “a tall and noble animal” (202), is repeatedly provoked by his officer, Radney, and
eventually strikes out at him. The attack causes a mutiny aboard the ship and a small skirmish
between the sailors who support Steelkilt and those who remain faithful to the captain and
officers. Steelkilt and his comrades are captured and imprisoned in the ship’s hull, and they are
eventually punished with the whip. Radney takes it upon himself to personally whip his enemy,
Steelkilt, a cowardly act that only increases his own danger when Steelkilt is released and begins
to plot Radney’s murder. Steelkilt is about to do the terrible deed when a whale is spotted; it is
none other than Moby Dick. Ishmael says that “By a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to
step in to take out of his [Steelkilt’s] hands into its own the damning thing he would have done”
(211)—before Steelkilt can murder his enemy, Radney falls into the sea and is eaten by the white
whale. Ishmael is not surprised that the noble Steelkilt was prevented from committing the
crime: “Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily
mapped out before the world itself was charted” (212).
The story finished, Ishmael’s companions clamor to know whether the tale is true. Don
Sebastian says, “Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your story
is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable
source? Bear with me if I seem to press” (212). Ishmael assures his friends that the tale is true,
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calling for “a copy of the Holy Evangelists” upon which to swear, as well as for a priest to
witness his oath. Before priest and Bible Ishmael vows that “So help me Heaven, and on my
honor, the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with
Steelkilt since the death of Radney” (213-214).
The opening and closing sections of this story are immediately important in an
examination of the story’s demonstration of the multiple audiences and agendas present in MobyDick—that is, the opening section in which Ishmael describes the elaborate and somewhat
unbelievable avenue by which he acquires the story of the Town-Ho, and the closing section in
which Ishmael describes the elaborate and somewhat unbelievable measures he takes to insure
readers that his telling is “in substance and its great items, true.” One of the reasons why these
sections demand instant attention is because they offer readers the very same sort of mixed
message found earlier in regard to “The Doubloon.” In “The Doubloon,” the mixed message
arises due to the disagreement between Ishmael and Melville in regard to epistemology. While
Ishmael uses the readings of his other crewmates to demonstrate the validity of his idea that
“certain significance” can be found in symbols and events, Melville warns readers that this is not
the case by ironically showing that all of the readings that Ishmael offers provide different
interpretations. Here, in “The Town-Ho’s Story,” Ishmael takes great pains to insure that his
audience believes his account of the events aboard the Town-Ho, and also that they agree with
his assertion that “a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events,” by swearing on a
Bible in front of a priest, and though his assertion that “I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have
seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.” On the other hand, though, at the
beginning of the story Melville provides the elaborate way through which Ishmael receives the
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information: several years after the events, from three sailors, through the sleeping Tashtego (a
Native American who can barely speak English while awake to say nothing of his abilities while
asleep), and then verbatim in the manner in which he tells it to a group of friends years earlier in
Lima. Even Ishmael’s assertion at the end that he spoke to Steelkilt works against rather than for
his reliability as a storyteller; of course Steelkilt wants to think that Moby Dick’s actions were
orchestrated by a higher power and that he was saved from terrible sin; he is certainly no less
superstitious than the other sailors whose superstitious natures were analyzed by McSweeney
above. While the reader may want to believe what Ishmael says—it is, as Don Sebastian says, a
story “so passing wonderful”—in light of Melville’s warning, how can he be believed? The
Town-Ho’s story becomes just another of Ishmael’s interpretations (which, even before Ishmael
claims the tale, was interpreted and shared by Steelkilt, the three sailors, and Tashtego).
To focus on Ishmael and his closing of the story for a moment, just what is it about the
story he tells that he wants to be sure that his audience believes? Why is he so concerned with
convincing us of his reliability as a narrator that he depicts himself swearing on holy books and
to priests? To answer such a question I need only point to the cause for Ishmael’s statement that
“the general interest of the White Whale was now wildly heightened . . .” (199) because in this
story, Moby Dick is not featured as simply an average whale, but rather as an supernatural force,
an act of God. During the course of the story Ishmael asserts that Moby Dick is “A very white,
and famous, and most deadly immortal monster” (211) who plays a large part in the “strange
fatality” that “pervades the whole career of these events” (212). The story of the Town-Ho, as
well as making for an interesting yarn to spin for two friends on a warm night in Lima, is also, at
least to Ishmael, further proof of the interpretation of his own story that he asserts in the very
first chapter of Moby-Dick—that fate does exist and this force operates behind all the events
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which Ishmael has undergone. The Town-Ho’s story, presented as a tale entirely independent of
the tale of Moby-Dick, confirms Ishmael’s surmise by describing events that also possess a
“strange fatality.”
Moving on to the issue of audience, it must be noted that of course, to a certain degree,
we want to believe Ishmael and all of his stories. He goes to great pains in Chapters 41 (“Moby
Dick”) and 42 (“The Whiteness of the Whale”) to fill readers’ heads with all manner of strange
legends and observations concerning the white whale, and when the Town-Ho’s story is told
some chapters later, it is exciting to imagine Moby Dick as the immortal beast that Ishmael
claims he is, and to believe that, as he says, all of these events were ordained “before the world
itself was charted.” The idea of fate is what makes the story of Moby-Dick a tragedy (as will be
discussed later) and therefore romantic and exciting. In this respect—in our desire to believe the
narrator, Ishmael, in regard to the events of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” or of “The Doubloon,” or
even to begin with, in “Loomings”—we fall into one of the several audiences which Peter
Rabinowitz describes in his “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” The audience
into which we fall is one Rabinowitz calls the narrative audience (214). In regard to the nature of
this audience, Rabinowitz says that “Since the novel is generally an imitation of some
nonfictional form (usually history, including biography and autobiography), the narrator of the
novel (implicit or explicit) is generally an imitation of an author. He writes for an imitation
audience,” an audience which exists within the fictional world of the novel and accepts as fact
certain characteristics of that world (214). Rabinowitz points out that while reading, we join this
audience and “for a while we believe that a woman named Anna Karenina really exists, and
thinks and acts in a certain way, or, on a broader scale, that Yoknapatawpha County and its
inhabitants really exist” (215). This audience believes in the dark future of 1984 (215) and in the
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bizarre transformation featured in The Metamorphosis (216). In regard to Moby-Dick, when we
join this audience we believe in the existence of Ahab, Moby Dick, and in the method of reading
described in “The Doubloon.” Most importantly, we believe in the events aboard the Town-Ho
which Ishmael narrates, and we believe in the possibility of fate and of Moby Dick’s identity as a
supernatural instrument—arguments that contribute to Ishmael’s overall agenda (which the
narrative audience will also believe), which is to argue that fate plays a role in the events detailed
in his book.
The reason this particular chapter is most suitable for discussing Moby-Dick’s narrative
audience is because Ishmael actually incarnates that audience when he insists on retelling the
Town-Ho’s story as he first told it in Lima. His friends, the two dons, become representative of
Ishmael’s entire narrative audience, and (this is very important to Ishmael) they seem to behave
exactly as Ishmael would want his audience to behave and react to his narration. They are
interested in his story, they hold him in esteem, and they even encourage his tangential asides
into explanations of Lakemen (201) and canallers (206)—tangents which are small
representations of the essay chapters which are dispersed throughout the larger narrative of
Moby-Dick. Finally, and most importantly, they not only like Ishmael’s stories, they actually
believe them—or so we are led to assume at the end of the chapter when Ishmael marshals his
evidence for the dons: he swears upon a holy book in front of a holy man; he got the story from a
reliable source (the three sailors, Tashtego); and he trod the Town-Ho, knew its crew, and spoke
to Steelkilt (Melville 214). While reading the novel, we as readers sit beside the two dons and
nod along with them, intent on Ishmael’s every fantastic word. To a certain degree, it is only
right that we are a part of this audience since our presence in the narrative audience largely
determines any enjoyment we receive from any work of literature. Thus one author and one
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authorial agenda of the novel is accounted for here, and one of the audiences to which readers are
called to belong. As I have said above, however, there is another author, another agenda, and
another audience.
While it is enjoyable to allow a part of ourselves to join the dons in Lima and connect
with Ishmael’s narrative audience, it is not possible for a reader to be as complete a member of
such an audience as it is for the two fictional dons. An aware reader would never entirely enter
the world of Moby-Dick, never entirely accept all of the facts that such an entrance would
necessitate (the existence of Moby Dick, etc.), and would never entirely believe everything
which Ishmael has to say. This is due to the fact that, as well as being a member of the narrative
audience, Rabinowitz argues that the reader is simultaneously a member of another audience, the
authorial audience (213). At the level of the authorial audience, readers are still aware of the
artificiality of the construction which the author presents to them while at the same time
attempting to understand the message of that text. The authorial audience tries to meet the
intellectual, moral, and philosophical expectations of a work’s author, but is still free to question
and doubt the information which the author presents. It is to this more sophisticated audience
which Melville, Moby-Dick’s actual author, directs his criticisms of Ishmael, of Ishmael’s
interpretation of events, and of Ishmael’s epistemological opinions. It is to this audience that
Melville voices his own agenda. While the narrative audience believes the narrator and all of his
oaths and proofs at the end of the Town-Ho’s story, the authorial audience sees the beginning of
the story where Melville points out the unlikely way in which Ishmael acquires his information,
and therefore doubts the narrator: due to the circumstances described, there is little chance that
Ishmael is in possession of reliable information. The signal from Melville described here is, as
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mentioned above, similar to the signal offered in “The Doubloon,” in which Ishmael’s credibility
is also undermined.
As well as pointing out the unreliability of Ishmael’s story signaled by the way in which
he gathered his information, Melville’s signal also encourages the reader to pay attention to the
ways in which Ishmael purposefully manipulates the information which he passes on to his
readers. In his insistence on dramatizing the telling of the Town-Ho’s story by retelling the Lima
version “For my humor’s sake,” Ishmael reveals his intentional manipulation of the text. He is
not concerned just with offering the reader valid information but seeks to perform the
information, choosing a method of performance in which the gullible presence of the dons as an
audience encourages the other members of his narrative audience to believe his story as well.
The two dons gasp and sigh at the greatness of the story and at the end provide Ishmael with a
situation in which Ishmael can prove the veracity of his tale to an exaggerated degree: calling for
a priest and “the largest sized Evangelists” that can be found (214). Responding so such prompts
as these, the authorial audience is aware of the artificiality of Ishmael’s story, of its unlikely
truth, and of its probable manipulation. This audience, then, convinced that Ishmael only
interprets the meaning of the events of the Town-Ho, ultimately responds to Melville’s authorial
agenda, which is to undermine Ishmael’s epistemological opinion and his conclusion that fate
decreed the events aboard the Pequod as if they were “verily mapped out before the world itself
was charted.” In this way, the second author, authorial agenda, and audience in Moby-Dick is
accounted for.
Before continuing to the fourth section of this study, I wish to include a final note here
that might account for the differing agendas contending within the pages of Moby-Dick. That
such agendas exist I have illustrated several times, but I would here explain them in as precise a
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manner as possible by offering a label under which Ishmael may be categorized as a narrator.
Wayne Booth speaks in his “Distance and Point of View” of an unreliable narrator (148). It
must be pointed out that an unreliable narrator is not a narrator who lies to his audience or who is
simply equipped with misinformation; nor is a reliable narrator always a truth-teller. The
unreliability of a narrator comes about, as Booth says, he not speak or act “in accordance with
the norms of the work” (148). Unreliable narrators are “those narrators who are presented as if
they spoke throughout for the norms of the book and who do not in fact do so” (148). The norm
of Moby-Dick, I would argue, is the impossibility of knowledge: the impossibility of reading a
“certain significance” in the doubloon; the impossibility of identifying the dark shape looming in
the painting in the Spouter Inn (Chapter 3); the impossibility of determining whether the spout of
the whale is composed of water or air (Chapter 85). Ishmael speaks and acts against this norm by
insisting that “certain significance” can be discovered in such physical objects, though his
readings of them are as inconclusive as that of the Spouter Inn painting, or as subjective of those
featured in “The Doubloon.” This provides a precise way not only of labeling Ishmael, but of
describing his (and Melville’s) agenda. Melville seeks to uphold the norm of his book by
pointing out Ishmael’s inconclusive or subjective readings; Ishmael seeks to disregard this norm
by insisting he can “see a little into the springs and motives” of things and by backing up such an
insistence by manipulating the text of Moby-Dick, interpreting events rather than simply retelling
them.
Ishmael’s manipulation of the text of Moby-Dick is the primary subject of the fourth
section of this study. Just as Ishmael is shown creating meaning in “The Town-Ho’s Story” by
offering information which he certainly did not possess from a verifiable source and
manipulating the text to support to interpretation of events by including the narrative device of
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the two dons, so too does he create and manipulate meaning throughout Moby-Dick. Chapter 54,
“The Town-Ho’s Story” is only a small example of Ishmael’s wide-ranging textual
manipulations.
IV. “Moby Dick”
Ishmael’s insistence in “The Town-Ho’s Story” that he is a trustworthy narrator is the
issue on which I would like to touch first in this section. As well as all of the textual
manipulations that I will describe later in the section, Ishmael’s need to be believed is one of
those characteristics of the Town-Ho’s story that is reflected in the entirety of Moby-Dick. In
“The Town-Ho’s Story,” Ishmael so desires that his story be believed that he depicts himself
swearing on a copy of the Holy Bible in front of a priest—he says, “Let me remove my hat.
Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch
it. So help me Heaven, and on my honor, the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and
its great items, true” (214). From his oath we know that even he realizes his story may be a little
too fantastic to be believed since he includes the clause that the tale is only true “in substance
and its great items.” Nevertheless, he gathers his evidence—“I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I
have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney” (214)—hoping the dons and the
rest of his narrative audience will believe him anyway. I have already discussed what Ishmael
hopes to gain from swearing this oath before his narrative audience, and I have discussed its
effect on Melville’s authorial audience; I call these facts to mind only so that we can examine
their counterparts elsewhere in the novel.
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When it comes to his dependability as a narrator, Ishmael rarely asserts in an outright
manner that he can be trusted. The only instance of such an assertion comes in Chapter 102, “A
Bower in the Arsacides,” when, about to begin a study of the interior regions of whale anatomy,
Ishmael voices the doubt in his abilities which his audience certainly harbors: “But how now,
Ishmael? How is it that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the
subterranean parts of the whale?” (344) He continues, saying, “A veritable witness have you
hitherto been, Ishmael, but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege
of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters; ridge-pole, sleepers, and underpinnings,
making up the frame-work of the leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries,
and cheeseries in his bowels” (344). This self-questioning of Ishmael’s abilities, bringing the
veracity of his information into doubt, might be directed at many of his observations concerning
the whale, not just those regarding the “joists and beams” which he discusses here. A great deal
of Ishmael’s store of knowledge goes undocumented and unexplained. It is here, though, that
Ishmael chooses to acknowledge our doubts, quickly dispelling them in the next paragraph by
informing his audience that he knows the inside of the whale because he studied the skeleton of a
beached whale on one of the Arsacides (344). As to our doubts in regard to the other dubious
information in Moby-Dick, he calls himself a “veritable witness,” insisting that he has been such
“hitherto.” He even does this in such a manner as to make the title come from our own mouths,
since he is here voicing what should be thoughts of his audience rather than those of his own
mind. Ishmael’s arguments regarding his reliability are rarely as vocal as that which is described
here. Most often, Ishmael argues for his status as a “veritable witness” in the more subtle way
described at the end of “The Town-Ho’s Story”: by citing sources, dropping names, and detailing
his experiences. Chapter 102 can be used as an example of this subtle authority as well. Ishmael
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calls himself a veritable witness in this chapter, and he supports his status as such by detailing
the experience by which he gained certain information—that is, by crawling through the beached
whale skeleton on one of the Arsacides, measuring the bones, and by later tattooing the
information on his arm (346). This is only one example of the roundabout ways in which Ishmael
asserts his dependability; the novel includes others, including Ishmael’s interview with Steelkilt
(214); his relation with Captain D’Wolf to support his comments in “The Affidavit” (174-75);
and the long list of whale-related sources he has consulted (and improved upon) at the opening of
Chapter 32, “Cetology” (115).
Direct references to citations and interviews aside, the chapters containing essays on
whaling history, whale anatomy, and whaling implements are themselves subtle ways with which
Ishmael seeks to gain the trust of his audience. Though Ishmael rarely reveals the methods in
which he procures most of his knowledge of these subjects, aside from his own observation, the
fact that nearly half of the work’s 135 chapters are more concerned with these subjects of study
rather than with action or character development (one need only run down a list of the chapters
and read of the names to see that this is so) would seem to lend credibility to Ishmael as a source
of genuine whaling knowledge. As well as these essay chapters, Ishmael’s overall language and
style as a narrator and his habit of including a “heterogeneous mixture of allusions, similes, and
analogies” argue for his scholarship and dependability (McSweeney 32). McSweeney lists
several of these allusions in his study:
A sampling of Ishmael’s extravagance and fecundity of allusion includes the
following: mummified ibis birds found in ancient Egyptian tombs; Pythagoras’s
advice to his followers not to eat beans because they cause flatulence; the travels
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of John Ledyard by dogsled through Siberia and Mungo Park’s journeys in the
heart of Africa; the fact that bottled ale spoils in the Indies; the opposition of the
ancient Orphites to the God of the Old Testament and their glorification of the
serpent as the liberator of humanity; the Iroquois’s midwinter sacrifice of the
sacred White Dog; the theory of Lockean philosophers concern primary and
secondary qualities; Procopius’s History of His Own Time; a horizontal burst
boiler out of a Mississippi steamer; the title page of Francis Bacon’s 1605
Advancement of Learning; the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham; the deceptive
appearance of recumbent elephants in the plains of India . . . . (32-33)
McSweeney’s list goes on, giving several more such allusions, but this is enough of a list here to
show that Ishmael’s writing style depicts him as a fairly scholarly individual. Ishmael’s
language, in combination with his direct citations and interviews, his own exploratory
experiences, his observations and insights, his oaths and confidence, and his outright insistence
that he can be trusted, argues strongly for his believability. He has gone to every length to help
insure that his audience believes not only his observations concerning the whale and whaling, but
also his ability to see “certain significance” in physical objects and events, and, most
importantly, that his audience believes his personal interpretation of events about the Pequod.
Ishmael’s textual manipulations, however, if carefully observed by Melville’s authorial audience,
make just as strong a case for Ishmael’s status as an unreliable narrator and undermine all of
Ishmael’s careful arguments and posturing as a reliable narrator.
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The textual manipulation which Melville specifically points out in “The Town-Ho’s
Story” is Ishmael’s choice to dramatize the telling of the story, including an audience whose
questions conveniently allow him to point out the information (about Lakemen, about canallers)
which he wants to discuss, and which provids him with an opportunity to swear an oath
concerning his desire to be a dependable narrator. Also, Melville points out the bizarre way in
which Ishmael received his story (second, third, or even fourth hand), and the other unreliable
source, Steelkilt, who shaped Ishmael’s interpretations of events. Such manipulations as this are
present throughout Moby-Dick. I have already discussed one of these manipulations—Ishmael’s
tendency to shift from an incarnated to an omniscient narrator, thus allowing him to appear to
read minds, providing information to which he has no access. I specifically pointed out a series
of chapters (Chapters 37 through 39) in which this occurs, and added Chapter 99, “The
Doubloon,” as an additional example, since for a great amount of the chapter, Ishmael reads
Stubb’s mind. I will not give further examples of this narration shift here, though many more
exist throughout the work. Rather, I want to focus on a different brand of textual manipulation
which Ishmael employs. What I want to discuss is the way Ishmael imports conventions and
elements from other genres into his autobiographical account in order to emphasize the presence
of fate and other supernatural forces in his tale. Such a narrative act creates an atmosphere in the
story which supports Ishmael’s interpretation of that story.
I will begin first with the dramatic elements which Ishmael uses throughout his story
since he begins drawing the connections between drama, fate, and his own tale in the very first
chapter of his book. As I mentioned earlier, Ishmael uses stage imagery in “Loomings” when
discussing the role of fate in the events he is about to narrate. He calls the Fates “stage
managers” (22) and refers to his “shabby part,” wondering why he was put down as an actor
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aboard a whaling voyage while “others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies,
and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces . . .” (22). He even
discusses the “grand programme of Providence” as though it were a theatre bill:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL
“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.” (22)
In making such metaphors, Ishmael connects the scripted nature of drama with the notion
of fate, creating an atmosphere of predestination immediately in the first chapter of the work.
Throughout, Ishmael continues to use imagery and elements from the genre of drama, and in
doing so extends the idea of fate in Moby-Dick. One of the more noticeable uses of dramatic
elements has already been mentioned in this study: the use of stage directions in the chapters. In
regard to the series of narrative shifting chapters, each contains stage directions to set up the
scene:
(The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.) (142)
(By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.) (144)
(A burst of revelry from the forecastle.) (144)
(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.) (145)
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There are several other examples of dramatic imagery in Moby-Dick, but I will not list them all
here. Here, however, is a short list of some chapters in which stage directions appear: Chapters
29, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 (perhaps the best example since here the entire chapter takes the form of a
play script), 108, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, and 129.
The inclusion of stage directions such as these connects directly with the notion of
Providence as a theatre bill and with the Fates as stage managers in “Loomings.” The directions
make the actions of the novel seem as controlled and immutable as a well-rehearsed play. They
make the events seem, as Ishmael says in “The Town-Ho’s story,” “as if verily mapped out
before the world itself was charted” (212), or, as Ahab says in Chapter 134, “The Chase—
Second Day,” as though the events were “rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this
ocean rolled” (418). Such a manipulation certainly supports Ishmael’s notion that the story of
the Pequod is controlled by fate.
While these manipulations certainly seem to help Ishmael in his address to his narrative
audience, portraying him as a scholarly and dependable narrator and portraying his story as one
“rehearsed . . . a billion years before this ocean rolled,” they are also the signals which Melville
uses to convince his authorial audience that Ishmael is interpreting the events aboard the Pequod
rather than faithfully retelling them. While the dramatic elements certainly create Ishmael’s
desired atmosphere, they are also so glaringly obvious a manipulation that one cannot help but
realize that Ishmael is changing the story, signals from Melville that the tale cannot be entirely
believed. I did not discuss this facet when I first introduced the idea of Melville’s signals to his
authorial audience, but I must discuss it now that the examples of these signals begin to mount:
that those ways in which Ishmael attempts to win over his narrative audience (showing the
doubloon readings, swearing on the Bible, insisting he has spoken to Steelkilt, importing
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dramatic elements) are exactly the same images, symbols, and events which Melville uses as
signals to win over his authorial audience. It is an amazing characteristic of this novel that two
voices (Ishmael’s and Melville’s) speak with one mouth, in the form of one set of words, to
forward warring agendas, and that it is the responsibility of reader to observe that those things
which are Ishmael’s narrative tricks are Melville’s authorial warnings. It is the responsibility of
the reader to observe that he is part of two audiences while reading Moby-Dick, and that in order
to accept the full significance of the book, he must be a member of both audiences
simultaneously: a part of the narrative audience to enjoy Ishmael’s observations, his exciting
story, his romantic epistemological viewpoint; but also a part of the authorial audience in order
to see the point Melville attempts to communicate—that Ishmael’s story is only a cleverly
constructed interpretation of events; that if a different character told the story, it would not be the
same; that no one can see into the “springs and motives” of the thing, and that the truth cannot be
known.
V. “Surmises”
Of all the questions concerning Moby-Dick listed in the very first paragraph of this
study—questions concerning anything from philosophy to politics—I have attempted to
introduce and discuss only two: the questions fundamentally epistemological and narratorial. In
the preceding sections, I have discussed the two authorial presences in Moby-Dick: Melville’s
and Ishmael’s. Likewise, I have discussed the two authorial agendas that each of them as
pursued. As he states in his first chapter, Ishmael seeks to understand the events aboard the
Pequod which only he survived. To do this, he retells the story of that voyage, and begins to read
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a “certain significance” within the actions and symbols and accompanied the voyage, leading
him to become convinced that fate was the commanding force behind Ahab’s madness, Moby
Dick’s malignancy, and the crew’s destruction. He is able to see these things due to his
epistemological point of view, a point of view which accounts for the reading of metaphysical
knowledge in physical objects. Additionally, in order to recount events in accordance with his
interpretation of them, Ishmael composes a book in which he breaks narrative conventions and
manipulates the information and the text in such a way as to force them to support his ideas.
Contrary to this agenda, Melville’s own reason for composing Moby-Dick is to criticize the
actions of his narrator, reusing the very textual manipulations that Ishmael hopes will support his
ideas to draw attention to Ishmael’s breaks from convention. In doing so, Melville reveals an
epistemological view which is quite opposite from Ishmael’s: in criticizing Ishmael’s reading of
symbols and events, Melville insists that there is no “certain significance” to be gained from
these objects, or, if there is just a thing, it is not accessible to mankind as his readings will only
consistently be incomplete or entirely subjective. As well as arguing for these things—the two
authors and two agendas—I have also described the two audiences of which readers are called to
be members: the authorial and narrative audiences. In order to fully realize the reading of MobyDick described above, a reader must allow himself to join each audience. He must be a part of
the narrative audience in order to understand Ishmael’s intentions and methods, and then he must
be a part of the authorial audience in order to reject those intentions and methods and realize the
underlying epistemological criticism that is taking place in the work. I have introduced and
argued for all of these issues, but I have yet to discuss why Melville would make such an
epistemological argument. I cannot answer this questions with any certainly; I can only surmise.
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I will attempt to guess at Melville’s motivations here by placing his epistemological idea within
the context of the American epistemological tradition.
Epistemology is of course the study of what it is possible for mankind to know about the
universe and of how it is possible (that is, by what means it is possible) for mankind to gain this
knowledge. When it comes to such and issue, America has a rather diverse tradition. I will give
only a brief description of it here, beginning with America’s first European settlers, the Puritans.
When considering the Puritan epistemology, it is plain that there is a great deal of information to
which mankind has access. The Puritans would insist that man has access to knowledge about
God and heaven, and about the devil in hell. He can know about the afterlife and about God’s
purpose (its existence, at least, if not its particulars). He can know about the world: the history of
its peoples, the wisdom of its elders, the distinctions between that which is virtuous and all of
that which is sin. Man can know all of this, and the venue through which he can acquire this
knowledge is through the Bible, or, more generally, through divine revelation. According to the
Puritan epistemologym what mankind can know, he knows because it is given to him by a divine
power.
Contrasting with Puritan epistemology is that which arrived in the eighteenth century.
Under the new ideas of empiricism in this Age of Reason, that which mankind could know, and
the ways by which he could know it, become much more limited. The only venues for
knowledge open to mankind are his five senses and the reason with which he uses them to make
observations. Divine revelation being closed to him, the empiricists insisted that spiritual
knowledge—knowledge of God, the afterlife, Providence—was inaccessible. It was during this
age that deism arose as a religious ideology—an ideology which argued that God existed and
created the universe, but then retreated beyond human access. Under this ideology there was no
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divine revelation and certainly miracles. All that was left to mankind in order to understand the
world were his senses and his mind.
The nineteenth century, Melville’s own time, saw a return to a more spiritually-oriented
epistemology with the work and thoughts of the New England transcendentalists. The
epistemological ideas of these writers and thinkers resembled nothing so much as that exhibited
by Ishmael in the discussion above: they believed that “certain significance” lurked in the
physical world. The transcendentalists argued that spiritual knowledge was accessible to
mankind, but unlike the Puritans, they did not believe it was accessible through divine revelation.
Rather, they viewed the physical world as a text in which such metaphysical knowledge was
accessible to all who would look with their imaginations and intuitions, not simply to those lucky
enough to experience divine revelation. The idea is summed up nicely in Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s essays. In “Nature” he says that “Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are
unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever
curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy” (15).
Also, in the introduction of the collection of Emerson essays from which this quotation is taken,
another apt quotation appears: “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or
tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.” Both of
these passages describe the metaphysical presence and knowledge in everyday objects and events
that is there to be seen by any one who can peel away the disguises which both Emerson and
Ishmael (as mentioned in the first section) believe obscure the world.
While Ishmael’s own epistemological view closely resembles that of the
transcendentalists, I do not argue that it is the transcendentalists alone to whom Melville reacts
with his criticisms in Moby-Dick. Rather, I argue that Melville is reacting against the entire
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American epistemological tradition that I have described above. I have talked time and time
again in this study about that one seemingly central symbol in Moby-Dick, the doubloon, and it
seems to me that my description of the Puritan, empiricist, and transcendental epistemologies
above is simply one last disguised version of the doubloon chapter all over again. Each of these
groups, or readers, is studying the same text, the universe, and walking away with a different
interpretation that they are absolutely certain is correct. Melville, an individual with a personal
interest in the nature of the truth, must have found this diversity of subjective meanings very
frustrating, because the Puritan epistemology did not simply disappear when empiricism entered
the country, and likewise in regard to empiricism and transcendentalism. Each of these points of
view was alive and well during Melville’s time, and undoubtedly he was not the only one
confused about what exactly he should believe. It is my guess, then, then Moby-Dick is a reaction
to all epistemological views that support a “certain significance” about anything from any venue.
Every point of view, the Puritan, empiricist, transcendental, and even Melville’s, is just another
incomplete or subjective reading of the same text.
I am aware of the fallacy involved in attempting to guess an author’s motives. On top of
that, I am aware of the fallacy involved in offering a correct interpretation of an author’s work,
as well. I do not kid myself: this is my reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, my
interpretation of its epistemological and narrative contents. I am sure that were Melville reading
this study right now, he would be chuckling to himself and thinking about a gold doubloon.
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Works Cited
Bezanson, Walter E. “Moby-Dick: Work of Art.” Moby Dick. Ed. Hershel Parker and
Harrison Hayford. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2002, pp. 641657.
Booth, Wayne. C. “Distance and Point of View.” Narrative/Theory. David H. Richter. Ed.
White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers, 1996, 139-151.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems. Ed. Robert D.
Richardson, Jr. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
McSweeney, Kerry. Moby-Dick: Ishmael’s Mighty Book. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, No. 3.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, Inc., 2002.
Rabinowitz, Peter. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Narrative/Theory.
David H. Richter. Ed. White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers, 1996, 208-225.