Why does Ishmael seem invisible?\u00a0 He is always narrating, and yet he never seems to arrive in front of us.\u00a0 We learn of his personal history only through vague allusions, such as Cornelia\u2019s example below.\u00a0 He can be equated with Melville, and the openness of his character equates him with the reader as well.\u00a0 He uses \u201cI\u201d, \u201cone\u201d, and \u201cyou\u201d equivalently, actively switching between them.\u00a0 Chapter 3 begins: \u201cEntering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft\u201d (9).\u00a0 It is the reader who enters the room, the \u201ceveryman\u201d (\u201cone\u201d) who is reminded of a ship, but it is Ishmael\u2019s own memory which resonates.\u00a0 He is a non-entity, an empty-filled tour guide of the country of the whale.<\/p>\n
Yet for all his invisibility of self, Ishmael is omnipresent in the novel.\u00a0 His voice is highly idiosyncratic, and it controls all observations and digressions.\u00a0 He steers the ship; he points the spotlight.\u00a0 How can we explain this?\u00a0 How can Ishmael be invisible and also everywhere?\u00a0 I found interesting answers in Harold Bloom and Gnosticism.\u00a0 From www.gnosis.org:<\/p>\n
a second characteristic of Gnosticism\u2026says Bloom, “is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the self, and [this] knowledge leads to freedom….” Primary among all the revelatory perceptions a Gnostic might reach was the profound awakening that came with knowledge that something within him was uncreated. The Gnostics called this “uncreated self” the divine seed, the pearl, the spark of knowing: consciousness, intelligence, light. And this seed of intellect was the self-same substance of God\u2026There was always a paradoxical cognizance of duality in experiencing this “self-within-a-self”. How could it not be paradoxical: By all rational perception, man clearly was not God, and yet in essential truth, was Godly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From this we can define Melville\/Ishmael\u2019s journey as one of Gnostic self-knowledge, or gnosis<\/em>.\u00a0 Having witnessed traces of the uncreated self, he abandoned his life of affluence and comfort for a quest into the watery wastes, in search of a deeper knowing, of a more sensible emptiness.<\/p>\n
Harold Bloom considers Gnosticism the religion of literature.\u00a0 Here\u2019s more illumination from the previous source:<\/p>\n
Gnostic experience was mythopoetic: in story and metaphor, and perhaps also in ritual enactments, Gnosticism sought expression of subtle, visionary insights inexpressible by rational proposition or dogmatic affirmation. For the Gnostics, revelation was the nature of Gnosis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Use this now to\u00a0 read the apocryphal story of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas:<\/p>\n
Jesus said, `I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out….He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Jesus is Melville\/Ishmael. His drink is the mythopoetic revelation called Moby-Dick<\/em>, and, by engaging in his quest for knowing, hidden things are revealed to us. The character of Ishmael is, then, one that serves in the quest of self-knowledge.\u00a0 He is a tool of the unification that is central to Gnostic teaching.<\/p>\n
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)<\/p>\n