"Call me Ishmael"

This may help to clarify my blog name. This is the introduction and conclusion to a paper I wrote on Moby Dick in American Lit. class. Ishmael is the lone wanderer at sea that Herman Melville uses to raise all sorts of existential questions about humanity and the seeming inaccessibility of God. Not that I agree with Melville's conclusions, but he raises intriguing and even damning questions.
The Apostle Paul compares the lives of those who love Christ to wandering nomads living in tents with no true stability in this world. I've been talking with a friend who has been experiencing like never before the volatility of our lives, that we could vanish in an instant from some freak accident or sickness. Melville certainly disagrees with me here, but while we certainly have unstable identities as regards our life on earth, for those who are Sons of God we find we have an immutable clue as to who we are in relation to the whole scheme of the universe, even when what is right in front of us is not so clear and very well may escape us as vapors at any moment.

Melville and the Game
From the introduction of the beloved narrator in Moby-Dick, one possible interpretation the modern reader may anticipate is akin to Tom Stoppard’s two nameless players thrown into Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing in particular to interest me on shore…” (MD 18). Just as Stoppard maintains the question of who is Rosencrantz and who is Guildenstern throughout the play, the reader of Moby-Dick has no assurance that Ishmael is the narrator’s actual name, but its implications from Abraham’s story in Genesis of an uncovenanted, man-made existence are certainly fitting to the circumstances in which Ishmael “set about performing the part [he] did” (MD 22). This begs a question central to both works: who is each individual in the grandness of the universe? Do we have stable identities, or are our names merely provisional in a vast improvisational scheme of things? It is no surprise that such a wanderer as Ishmael considers “[taking] this whole universe for a vast practical joke,” (188) but if such a thought is true, or at least if any ultimate meaning is inaccessible or unalterable to human hands, it must be detrimental to each person’s sense of identity and their ability to relate to those around them. Melville expounds upon this consideration in great detail throughout Moby-Dick as he contrasts Ahab’s monomania that leaves him as the inaccessible stuff of legend to Ishmael’s pragmatism whereby he survives only to be swallowed into obscurity. Melville’s answer is that while discontent with mortal bonds, man remains irreconcilable to any higher existence...
Melville essentially leaves room for two major types of existence in a world where it is impossible to take the whole of the human experience on a grand scale and balance it with explanation open to comprehension. The Ahabs may forever shake their fists towards the heavens, yet their cries will ever echo off the prison wall of transience. The Ishmaels may continue their existence oblivious to the malign signs of wrath or indifference from above, all while unable to find security or stability in any meaningful human connection, though they forever wander the earth. In man’s fleeting existence, if one acknowledges these limitations, as Ishmael, and learns somehow to adapt to what he is given by fate, there is some vague hope that “in truth man can perform great deeds” (Durer 253), but in either case, humanity is incorrigibly bound to decay in body and from memory. To Melville, man is the fatherless orphan without a savior: “He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms,” (169) crucified to his own mortality.