One Of My Favorite Parts Of Moby Dick Is When Ishmael Wants/needs To Tell Us Something But He Desperately

one of my favorite parts of moby dick is when ishmael wants/needs to tell us something but he desperately doesn't want to have to talk about it, he just buries it in a bunch of irrelevant information.

at the very beginning, he goes to church. a place filled with "silent grief... insular and incommunicable." and he sees these marble tablets on either side of the pulpit and says 'I don't really remember them all that well' (which is likely a lie. at the least it's extremely out of character for a man who directly quotes the internal monologues of other men) and proceeds to give three paraphrased examples. the first tablet is for a teenager, lost overboard off patagonia. the tablet was paid for by his sister. the second is for 6 men, taken by a whale they were hunting in the pacific. the tablet was paid for "by their surviving shipmates." the third is for a captain, killed on his own boat by a sperm whale off japan. the tablet was paid for by his widow. all seemingly normal.

except they're not. the first one is a red herring, seemingly irrelevant to our story. but the second? a memorial for a crew lost to a whale, left by their surviving shipmates? that's exactly what we're reading. the surviving shipmate is ishmael. he's all that remains. and then he pivots, drawing our attention to the much clearer parallel- the captain who loses his life on his own boat to a sperm whale. and we all immediately go "oh I know who that is! ahab!!" and ishmael succeeds. he needs us to see the sailors remembered by their surviving crew, but even more he needs to not address it. he needs us to not ask him about it. he wants this story to be told but he doesn't want to be the one telling it. he wants to pretend to be someone else, to be someone other than the one who survived. and for 135 chapters, he gets to be.