Feb 01 2010
Melville’s experiences as inhabited by Ishmael
After the lecture last class, I found it interesting, looking back through the text, to notice how Melville includes bits of his own personal experience and outlook through the guise of Ishmael. For instance, when Ishmael describes some impressions of Queepeg, he says,
“It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too – perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine – heaven! look at that tomahawk! (21-22)”
This quote particularly strikes me because of the narrator’s absurdity, but importantly, I remembered learning how in 1841 during one of his voyages to the Pacific – possibly it was to the Marquesa islands – Melville himself feared being the victim of a cannibalistic attack. It is rather interesting then to see how even though the author had suffered from this specific paranoia, he chooses an almost mocking tone in narrating Ishmael’s thoughts on the subject. Perhaps by the time he was writing this book – about 10 years later – he had overcome this fear, or maybe it was through being humorous that he became more comfortable about it.
It was mentioned in class too that Melville’s first novel, Typee, written in 1845, was based on his trip to the Marquesa islands. I find this interesting that he was able to create, or tell, so many stories from his few experiences at sea. Surely they were of great returns. This intrigues me as I sometimes think about how authors, whether they aim to write fictionally or autobiographically, are able to reinvent through text their personal experiences. I wonder what intentions Melville had of writing his experiences before he took his voyages. He must have known he would be seeing and experiencing places and people that would be wholly new to him, but what’s fascinating to me is how his ruminations and observations are still being read and discussed today.
One Response to “Melville’s experiences as inhabited by Ishmael”
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Sam, I think it’s great that you discovered that Ishmael seems to fear cannibalism the way Melville was rumored to fear it in the Marquesas, but moreover, that you found Melville to be mocking Ishmael’s fear — this is an important distinction to make here, between Melville and his narrator. Melville may have, as a young, callow sailor, believed he would be eaten by “savages” — but as you say, with the wisdom of age and experience, he learns that this is the belief of a naive fellow, and Ishmael is indeed a naive fellow (at least he is at the START of the voyage — we’ll see if he becomes wiser at the end). It’s important to note that not only is Melville mocking Ishmael, but Ishmael is mocking himself — which would suggest to you that Ishmael must be recounting this story some time after the experiences happened to him, giving him the gift of hindsight and making his see the errors in his thinking. Keep this in mind as you continue through the text — think of Ishmael as recording the thoughts he had as a young man, but also giving us signals that he thinks of himself as a young man as having been naive and silly.