Ishmael is definitely playing second fiddle to Isaac, and so too in Moby-Dick, where the Isaac to Moby-Dick’s Ishmael is Captain Ahab, the monomaniacal man on the hunt for his white whale. You don’t have to be a bible scholar to be familiar with the story of Abraham presenting Isaac for sacrifice I’d say it’s in the OT’s greatest hits catalog. Despite Ishmael being Abraham’s first son, it’s Isaac, his second son, who becomes a patriarch of the Israelites.
Herman Melville had vast knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments, and certainly chose this name carefully. Ishmael is Abraham’s first son, according to the three Abrahamic religions. By signing up you agree to our terms of use Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. We feel engaged, pulled in, along for the ride. It sets the reader and Ishmael as interlocutors, which is a different dynamic than readers often have with a text. Being told to “call me Ishmael” implies that the reader might be addressing Ishmael in the future. It also recognizes the reader with its direct command, creating immediacy and intimacy. It anchors the story in a first person narrative, with all the unreliability and limited scope that may imply. The opening sentence of Moby-Dick, short as it is, does a fair bit of work. I often encourage skeptics to read just the first paragraph, to dip a metaphorical toe into this oceanic book. Nonetheless, it’s my desert island novel. Not that it needs defending it’s obviously very firmly entrenched in the canon.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m a Moby-Dick defender. It has all these random chapters about whaling facts? Well, that last one’s true. Moby-Dick has a bad reputation among many readers-it’s ponderous, boring, overlong. If you haven’t read the subsequent sentences in the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, you might think the first sentence alone sounds grandiose. Moby-Dick is many a reader’s white whale.
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