Moby Dick

Having finally made it through this whole novel, I notice a number of connections between the epilogue and that first page and chapter when we meet Ishmael.  These are two of the only times when the reader is, in a sense, alone with him, and the story is about nothing else but his reflections.  Melville is a master at coming full circle and tying up loose ends, and he does plenty of it in the Epilogue.

First, we get Ishmael’s characteristic understated, brief start of the section – “Call me Ishmael” (21), or, “The drama’s done” (593).  There is also a great focus on death in both texts.  In the opening page, Ishmael states that he goes to see whenever he feels suicidal, or, as a “substitute for pistol and ball.”  A symptom of this psychological state, he says, is when he finds himself “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses.”  In the story he recounts in the epilogue, of course, Ishmael is closer to death than he has ever been, spinning slowly “like another Ixion” around the vortex of water that recently swallowed up the great Pequod.  He also has another encounter with a coffin, only this time, instead of serving as a symbol of his desire to die, a coffin springs up from the water and serves as his buoy, his survival device, until he is saved by the Rachel.

To further the connections made in the Epilogue, this coffin was made by Queequeg, the friend Ishmael meets in the opening chapters and forms an unlikely bond with.  Though this friendship is sparsely covered throughout the meat of the novel, Melville brings it up once again at the end.  Even though he is dead, Queequeg saves his best friend’s life.  And so, as if he just sat down, introduced himself as Ishmael and jotted down the entirety of the novel Moby Dick, our narrator finishes as he started, alone, philosophizing on the nature of death and the magnetic power of the sea.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1991.

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