CECIL M. BROWN
yes, you survived like a piece of driftwood survives (good image),
survived because you planned it that way, and
if
you didn't plan it,
how
is
it that although
it
is
Queequeg - that strange nigger from
the South Seas - who actually executed the idea of a coffin -life–
saver, it
is
you, the white boy, who survives on it? Do you
think
we
are stupid enough to believe that if Queequeg had anything to do
with the master plans he'd have let you survive on
his
lifesaver? And
furthennore, we are hip to your weird game - we
know
that the
white whale, that heinous symbol of the gray world, which "dark
Ahab" and his "mongrel crew" (i.e., the Third World, dig that)
detested so
is
none other than you, Ishmael- the white,
disem–
bodied, overliterate, boring, snobbish, insipid, jew-bastard, nigger–
lover, effete, mediocre, assistant-professor-type, liberal. But, really,
what can we do????
The tone is a bit rough, but there
is,
I believe, some truth in
this. For example, there is the question of Ishmael's noninvolvement
in the actual experiences of the voyage. There are pages and pages
of description of physical labor in this novel, physical labor that was
necessary on the whale ship, but in none of this labor do we find
Ishmael- despite the fact that he goes to length to inform us that
when he goes to sea, it is not as a passenger but as a "sailor." In
the descriptions of those fantastic harpooning scenes, it is impossible
to determine from what vantage point Ishmael
is
viewing the action;
it
is
as though he
is
everywhere at once, and consequently one never
has a visual image of where he
is
in the action -
if,
in deed, he
is
in at all. One kepts wondering, as he reads those scenes, did he lower
with the boats? Is he in Ahab's boat? Starbuck's? Or did he remain
on the ship? And even when the white whale destroys both the
boats and the
Pequod,
it
is
impossible to determine where Ishmael
is
really at.
Part of the aesthetic beauty of the book
is
that while it carries
a maximum of symbolic overtones, it is still simply a story of a
whaling voyage; Melville was careful to keep the novel literal;
and
the precise reason for
this
literal weight was to prevent, according
to Melville, critics from "scouting at Moby Dick as a monstrous
fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous intolerable
al–
legory." And yet, it
is
in Melville's failure to tie down Ishmael's
whereabouts when the ship went down to some literal statement (like,
"I, Ishmael owe my survival to the facetious fact that when the
