Ishmael in Moby-Dick Character Analysis

Character Analysis

Call Me What, Now?

It seems pretty easy to identify Ishmael and his role in Moby-Dick: he’s a young, white, American man living in the mid-nineteenth century. He’s educated, a little stuck up, and may once have been schoolteacher. He’s prone to depression, and when he gets really melancholic—or wants to knock off random people's hats—he likes to hire himself out as a common sailor. Convinced that a whaling trip would be the coolest kind of sea voyage (and we’re not saying he’s wrong, there), he joins the crew of the Pequod and tells us, in the first person, the story of his travels.

There. That’s who he is, right? What could be simpler than a story of exploration from an ordinary young sailor?

While you throw your head back and laugh sarcastically about the idea that anything in Moby-Dick could be "simple," we’ll be over here, thinking about Ishmael’s character. That’s if he even has a fully developed character... which we aren’t ready to claim.

If we think of a narrator as a lens through which we view the events of a story, then Ishmael, as a first person narrator, is the one lens that we can actually see. Still, although we’re aware of him, it’s very difficult to figure out what sort of effect supposedly simple Ishmael has on the story he’s telling us. Is he a telescope, a microscope, a kaleidoscope, a clear piece of glass, a dirty and scratched lens? Is he exaggerating, omitting, minimizing, distorting?

Heck, is he telling us his own story or someone else’s—Captain Ahab’s or even the White Whale’s? And can we trust him?

Okay, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning—the very beginning.