Jan 29 2010
The Perfect Career
Whaling is the perfect career for Ishmael. The story of Melville’s Ishmael closely parallels that of the Bible’s. Melville’s opening paragraph sets Ishmael in the same position that the baby Ishmael was placed in: both need water for survival. Melville then continues for several paragraphs describing the importance of water to humans. Melville binds the two Ishmaels by the one thing that will save both of their lives.
Violence also binds the two figures together. As we discussed in class, Genesis 16:12 describes Ishmael as
…a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
toward all his brothers. (Biblegateway.com)
Many times in the first few chapters, the narrator comments on the violence of whaling – in describing the “heathenish array of clubs and spears” that decorates the inn (Melville, 10), in his concern for Queequeg when he shaves with the head of a harpoon (Melville, 25), and in his confusion over the fact that a devout Quaker, such as Captain Bildad, would participate in such an occupation (66). For these reasons, the job of whaling meshes perfectly with the biblical figure for whom Melville’s character is named.
The biblical Ishmael also represents a person who followed a different path, just as Melville’s Ishmael makes his own way in the world. Melville’s characters would have grown up with the stories of Isaac and his descendents, but Ishmael’s story travels off in a different direction. In mirroring his namesake, Melville’s Ishmael can question the norm and decide his own fate. But Melville’s Ishmael strays even farther from any sort of settled path; even though he has so many connections to the Genesis story, this Ishmael does not even follow completely in his namesake’s footsteps. He defies the second part of the prophecy and makes a bosom friend, Queequog at the beginning of the novel. Although the job of whaling, where everyone must work smoothly together for the three long years that they inhabit the cramped quarters of the ship, seems to work against Ishmael’s prophecy, I think that Melville’s Ishmael makes himself even more similar to the biblical character by making himself a path different from the norm. But by tearing himself away from the constraints of the story that gives him his character, I think that Ishmael becomes even more closely tied to the biblical character. And whaling allows Ishmael to explore his freedom and question any norm or idea.
Another question that arises for Ishmael is the morality of whaling. In presenting this question, whaling allows him to question his life. Even though Ishmael seems destined for a whaling ship at the beginning of the novel, whaling is perhaps one of the most ungodly professions. Melville writes that Captain Bildad is “a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore” (66). Here Melville implies that whaling is comparable to murder – a act prohibited by one of the Ten Commandments. A few sentences later, Ishmael says that “a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world is quite another. This world pays dividends” (66). Ishmael is starting to question the well-travelled path of his past and searching for a new religion. He is becoming the biblical Ishmael. After all, Ishmael went on to father his own religion, Islam. The high seas offer Melville’s character a place in which to question and explore his ideas on religion.
Yet Ishmael is not the first to look to whaling for answers to spiritual questions. It seems that the entire town of New Bedford, and perhaps most of New England, has found a way to reconcile whaling with God. The imagery in chapters 7,8, and 9, “The Chapel,” “The Pulpit,” and “The Sermon” shows how far a church can go to becoming a whaling ship. This begs the question “how far can a whaling ship go to becoming a church?” The church, however, also raises another question for Ishmael to sort out. In chapter 8, “The Pulpit,” Melville describes the pulpit of the church as enclosing Father Mapple almost as if he is isolated from the congregation in a whaling-inspired room of his own. The description of the church as similar to a whaling ship makes me think that the Pequod will be a sort of community, but when Mapple shuts himself away, he makes prayer seem to be an individual activity. So on his journey, will God make Ishmael into “a great nation,” the metaphorical father of the men on the Pequod, or will Ishmael travel alone? (Biblegateway.com) Whaling seems to bring up many questions for Ishmael, but perhaps it will also reveal the answers to his unique future.
Works Cited:
- Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1988. Reissued 2008. Print.
- “Genesis 16:10-12.” Biblegateway. New International Version, Web. 29 Jan 2010. <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+16:10-12&version=NIV>.
- “Genesis 17:20.” Biblegateway. New International Version, Web. 29 Jan 2010. <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+17:20&version=NIV>.
One Response to “The Perfect Career”
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Shoshanna, this is a great post, complete with in-text citations and a Works Cited! Yay! You also did a very good job of selecting key quotations and passages from the text to examine closely and to support your opinions about why Ishmael might seek out the career of a whaler.
I like your argument that choosing whaling as a profession underscores Ishmael’s self-definition as a kind of social outcast, a sort of man who eschews the beaten path. I like that – I like how you come to an understanding of Ishmael-as-outcast as being a way for us to understand why the narrator would choose Ishmael, the Biblical figure, as a namesake. I do think, however, that you try a bit too hard to show that Ishmael and his Biblical namesake are similar, when in fact, they don’t have to be, and are not. We know very little from the Biblical text about the figure of Ishmael, save for what Genesis tells us — I think that if we assume too much about him, we think we see similarities between that Ishmael and Melville’s that don’t actually exist. I think you are absolutely right — Melville chose the name Ishmael because the Biblical Ishmael is a man who follows a different path. But I think Melville is also sometimes quite perverse (as we shall see), and he wants you to think about how this narrator Ishmael is NOT like the Biblical Ishmael (his hand is NOT against everyone’s, as you point out through your brief mention of his friendship with Queequeg). Despite feeling like a social outcast, and despite getting the “hypos” that cause him to have violent/depressed feelings, the narrator is not a violent man, and he chooses a very social profession — so he is and isn’t like the Biblical Ishmael. Ishmael in the Bible goes on to father the descendants that will eventually veer away from the nation that becomes Israelite to form a new religion — but Ishmael in the Bible does not FOUND Islam and I apologize if my comments in class seemed to give you that impression (no one in the Bible actually creates a religion — the Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures as they are now called, describes the important ancestral figures who prefigured what we know today as religion, but they themselves are merely credited with discovering monotheism). So I just want to warn you away from making too eager a reading of Ishmael as equivalent to the Bible — be aware, throughout the text, of how sometimes Melville wants us to see similarities between things, and how sometimes he wants us to see the ironic differences.
Overall, though, a GREAT way to address the category of “whaling.” Very creative.