Ishmael is maybe the most unhinged narrator i've ever encountered in a book. as many people have said, he comes at your with the energy of someone having a manic episode in line at the DMV. just "you can call me ishmael. you know that feeling when you want to step into traffic?" and then he gives you a full list with reviews of every hotel he didn't stay at last night and how he accidentally gay married a Polynesian prince (this is not even 60 pages in)
"He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends [...] How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair."
and despite his very distinctive voice, it's a relatively normal narrative until he actually gets on the ship. like there's tangents sure, but there's mostly plot happening in a linear sequence. but then we get to the ship and suddenly its time for Ishmael's 500 Theses on Whales and they're so weird like "here's why biologists are wrong and whales are fish actually" and "what if we did phrenology on whales, well here are my findings" and "one time i saw a whale skeleton in a pagan temple and i took its measurements but i didn't have any paper with me so i had its measurements tattooed onto my body for science(tm)" and it's just pages and pages and chapters and chapters of him being Super Weird about whales and the ocean, like obsessed with them but in a way that feels out of his control.
and he talks about the other people on the ship, and about the human actions involved in whaling, and sometimes plot things even happen that he relates to us, but mostly its not that. mostly its fake whale facts hour 24/7 365. and then pretty late in the book he tells the story of Pip the cabin boy and how one time during a whale chase Pip went into the water and was left to tread water until the chase was over. And it has a profound effect on Pib, like reallyyyy fucks him up
"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up; but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps [...] He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."
and Ishmael is like yeah Pib can hear the voice of god now, yeah that just sort of happens to a person if they're in the open sea for a few hours. yeah it happened to me. anyway,
"The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself."
and pretty soon after that chapter, the White Whale section starts. so all this time, Ishmael has been telling us the story of a whaling trip he took several years ago, and it's been told in the first person with one of the strongest POV character voices you'll ever encounter in fiction. And moby dick has been mentioned, and they're in general looking for him, but there's been no encounters. And then suddenly it's White Whale Time and Ishmael is no longer in the story.
like Ishmael is no longer doing fun asides about his thoughts on everything under the sun, suddenly its like Ishmael is pretending to be a third person omniscient narrator, and he is not even acknowledging he was there for any of this.
and he describes the chase and how the ship was sunk (and it's an obvious lie. like everything else about the chase is relatively realistic and then he describes the ship going down with all hands on board and it's absurd. he describes it going down, their heads just going under the water, no men trying to swim, no bodies floating in the ocean. the ship goes down and the men are on it and that's it.) and on the last page of the book, the epilogue, it switches back to first person and he's like oh and i was there, remember that unnamed bowsman i mentioned who got knocked out of Ahab's boat? that was me.
"I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman [...] the same who, when the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern."
and he explains that he survived in the coffin Queequeg had made during his fever, which had been turned into a life raft when Queequeg recovered. He floats in his dead husband's coffin for one day and one night. all alone in the open ocean, much much longer than Pib's few hours. And then the book is just over. The Epilogue isn't even a full page.
and it re-contextualizes the entire book. the way Ishmael is. the way he talks about whales and the ocean. the way he's obsessed with them. and also suddenly it seems like the whole middle bit wasn't just a weird detour, but was almost Ishmael dragging his feet, like he didn't want to get to the bad part. he wanted to put off Moby Dick for as long as possible. and once he got there the story was in 3rd person bc he had to disassociate to even get through the telling of it. suddenly this whole story has been about Ishmael's profound trauma this entire time. He is the one who saw God's foot upon the treadle, whose body was kept afloat while his infinite soul was drowned. who now seems mad.
