PARTISAN REVIEW
457
in the sense that Ahab, for example,
is
a character. The "I" for
Melville was a unifying devise through which he connected the
many facets of his own personality; hence the "I"
is
at once a
mystic, actor, poet, zoologist, ingenue, sailor, seer, humorist, popular
scholar and, above
all,
a superb conversationalist. Melville's use of
the "I"
is
very close to Chaucer's handling of it in
The Parliament
of Fowls;
the "I"
is
never defined as anything definite, so he can
be or move anywhere without ever being accused of being "incon–
sistent." The " I" therefore has none of the definite limitations, which
Ahab
has,
which are necessary to characterization. Ishmael, the "I,"
has no definite relationship, no real interaction, with members of
the ship, the way plausible characters do. Now
his
relationship with
Queequeg is not the reciprocal relation between two characters
(notice; we seldom hear Queequeg speak in
his
own words); it
is
rather one man's guesses about what may be going on in another
man. My point
is this;
the "I" of this book
is
really Melville's own
attitudes and prejudices;
if
we find fault in the "I" we are finding
fault in Melville
himself
and the age he represented, and we are not
just reading into
his
work. The "I" in the novel
is
not
a.
character,
in the sense that he can be criticized by another character in the
novel.
Ahab, for example, can never know Ishmael's guilt; Ahab and
Ishmael, the two most important characters never meet. What would
Ahab have thought of Ishmael, given Ishmael's amorphous personal–
ity? What would Ahab, for example, have thought of the fact that
Ishmael survived and wrote a book about the survival? Would Ahab
have thought Ishmael a moral coward? Would he have been impressed
at Ishmael's knowledge of whales, or would he have just shrugged his
shoulders and said it was too bookish? These are significant ques–
tions which the structure of the novel cannot explicidy answer.
Ishmael is not "a character" whose prejudices and attitudes the
novel can question.
It is only when we are able to criticize the "I," only when we
are able to include him in the story as a "character" that we can
answer the above questions. Ishmael would have repelled Ahab had
the two met, for Ishmael
is
not only the "I" in
this
novel but
also
"The Eye," the universal eye, the omniscient eye ("I") who sees
all.
Ishmael is God, and the old man would have resented this.
Ishmael
is,
as I have stated, not a person but a presence that
