Call Me Ishmael

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In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and asides.

As his role as a character erodes, says Bryant, "his life as a lyrical, poetic meditator upon whales and whaling transforms the novel once again. Melville coined words, critic Newton Arvin recognizes, as if the English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things he had to express.I suppose I don’t really know, but it is a little silly to insist that it should be written by an English author, as my fellow teachers did! The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on Hamlet: "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself.

But the shareholders of the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and orphaned children.

The concentration only gives way to more imagery: the "mastheads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs". In October Harper's New Monthly Magazine printed chapter 54, "The Town-Ho's Story", with a footnote saying: "From The Whale. Robert Zoellner pointed out that Ishmael's role as narrator "breaks down" either when Ahab and Stubb "have a conversation off by themselves" in chapter 29 or else when Ishmael reports "the soliloquy of Ahab sitting alone" in chapter 37.