Over at I cite I have a link to an important article by friend Tom Dumm that appeared in the Massachusetts Review 46, 3 (Fall 2005). I'll blow the ending: he argues that Ishmael is Pip. Tom reads Moby Dick in part out of his interest in loneliness. He writes: "To be lonely in America is to be black, and brilliant, constantly in danger of being bought and sold, rooted in the deepest genealogy of power and loss, and secret witness to a catastrophe that only deepens over time."
Here are a few excerpts from Dumm's article:
... C.L.R. James has made it the quintessential artistic representation of the impossible politics of American racialism. It has been made into film, into opera, and into a major Laurie Anderson performance piece. It has been borrowed by all forms of popular culture so ubiquitously that its characters are a shorthand for specific forms of madness, a fit echoing of Melville’s own use of master Shakespeare’s characters. The conflation of Melville the author with the narrator of the story—call him Ishmael (for now)—inevitably has encouraged psychoanalytic studies of him, perhaps most prominently Michael Rogin’s densely layered argument concerning the family fortune of the Melville clan and the political economy of a country on the brink and in the aftermath of civil war. The influence of the book on one of Melville’s own descendents has been so pronounced that he has named himself Moby, and has created ambient music reminiscent of the ocean. It is, in other words, a great temptation, a book to be reckoned with by anyone who wants to think about American experience.
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but for me, above all, the loneliness of the person, whoever he is, who says, “Call me Ishmael.” Who is Ishmael? For me, this is the most important question to ask if we are to think about the lonely self, this strange self that is beyond itself. The “who” of this question centers our thinking about the ends of loneliness—is there a “who” to whom we may repair, an identity that is able to settle us, a place for our placelessness, a home in the world for the lonely?
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The call is also a calling, the desire for a vocation: Ishmael goes to sea in a direct attempt to shake off one self and to assume another through the vocational acceptance of a calling. The story that is his to tell is the story of his acceptance of the vocation of sea-man, of sojourner to the sea. But while he will tell us this tale, it is not one of redemption, even as it assumes the form of a conversion from one form of life to another. The conversion itself is to assume the most complicated and devilish form, for what is to be born again is not a soul redeemed, nor, despite the inner turn it takes, a self-reliant self. Another way of putting the matter is to ask the question: Ishmael becomes a sea-man, but what was he before? And yet another question: when did he become a sea-man? When is Ishmael’s moment of conversion?
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Let me say it: the engine of Moby-Dick is the fact that Ishmael is Pip. The shattered identity of the narrator who demands or suggests or pleads that we call him Ishmael is that which is inhabited by the least significant member of the crew of the Pequod, Pip. It is Pip who alone survives to tell the tale, cook’s assistant assuming the identity of an imaginary seaman, an insignificant peeper passing with a new identity. It is Pip who is the silent witness to the most important as well as the most trivial events on board the ship. It is Pip who demands that we call him Ishmael and claims to be a seaman, Pip who imagines himself repelled by the black church he is stumbling into, Pip who claims at first to be repelled by the blackness of his eventually beloved Quequeg. It is Pip reporting on Pip’s descent to the bottom of the ocean, Pip describing how he saw God’s foot on the loom. Only Pip can provide witness to Pip’s experience.
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