A Harmonious Clash Of Moby Dick Essay - 1913 Words

A Harmonious Clash HOOK. In Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Ishmael blindly signs up for a whaling expedition with the monomaniacal Captain Ahab. The reader is able to experience Ahab’s farcical obsession through Ishmael’s stable point of view from the beginning of the journey to the tragic fate of the Pequod. Melville writes Moby Dick in manner where Ishmael and Ahab’s personalities differ, yet compliment one another. Ishmael’s reflective, equanimous, and detached perspective heavily contrasts with Ahab’s reactive, erratic, and obsessive personality, making them complementary characters. While Ishmael provides a stable lens into the life aboard the ship, Ahab’s fiery temperament is what progresses the narrative. Ishmael’s isolation and position as an objective outsider allows all readers to identify with him. The first words read in Moby Dick are, â€Å"Call me Ishmael† (Melville 18). In the bible, Abraham and Sarah cannot have any children so th ey ask their maidservant, Hagar, to essentially be a surrogate. She successfully gives birth to Ishmael, however, then Sarah miraculously became pregnant with Isaac. Seeing as Ishmael is technically illegitimate, Sarah convinces Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert so that Issac, her biological son, can become the next patriarch (Genesis). Therefore, when Melville’s narrator suggests to â€Å"call [him] Ishmael,† he is telling the reader that he, too, is an exile or outcast. This idea projects on a bigger scale in the