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Moby dick books on tape1/31/2024 ![]() ![]() Harold and Maude: also bringing up the rear of every funeral they meet. That sounds very serious, and suicide is very serious, but the paragraph is darkly funny, and beautiful, and does incredible character development in a few sentences. The paragraph basically says that when Ishmael’s suicidal ideation is beginning to get the best of him, it’s time to take to the sea. The rest of the first paragraph bears that out. The First Paragraphĭespite the depths you can plumb with name choices alone, you don’t have to care about allusions to enjoy Moby-Dick. Ahab, for the record, is the name of a wicked king in Hebrew scripture. 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. So what does it mean that the narrator’s name is Ishmael? ![]() It will take a lifetime of rereading to catch them all, and I’ve committed to this bizarre edition of Pokémon. One of the reasons Moby-Dick is my desert island novel is that its allusions are so rich and varied that there’s something new to find with every reading. Just like Ishmael himself.Īllusions in Moby-Dick: gotta catch ’em all. 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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