Ishmael as Evolving Character in Melville’s Redburn , White‐Jacket , Mardi , and Moby‐Dick

Abstract Most contemporary treatments of Herman Melville focus on issues related to cultural studies, biography, textual issues, performance, and New Media. Close textual readings, including those grounded in the study of character, have been largely out of vogue since the advent of Post‐colonial studies and French theory. However, these contemporary treatments may fail to capture the evolution of character and theme that is prevalent across many of the author’s early novels. Ishmael in particular, who is notoriously hard to grasp, may be usefully understood as developing across Redburn , White‐Jacket , and Mardi , before he emerges in the opening line of Moby‐Dick . Redburn uses language that clearly connects him to Ishmael, a young man going to sea in search of his father’s wisdom but instead discovering a cosmopolitan world of madness and deprivation, while in White‐Jacket , the title character attempts to shield himself from the horrors of a life aboard a ‘Man‐of‐War’ by insulating his ‘soul’ within the confines of a handmade white jacket. Failing in his attempt to isolate himself, he falls from the mainmast into the sea, his jacket caught in the arms of the rigging. Finally, in Mardi , Melville’s allegorical circumnavigation of the South Pacific, Babbalanja philosophizes in the same vein as Ishmael, trying to grasp some meaning out of the complexities of his experience. This article will analyze the characters of Redburn, White‐Jacket, Babbalanja, and Ishmael as representing the working out of the issues facing a single, evolving character, a character who adopts multiple perceptions in order to attempt integrating the many aspects of his self with the jarring and disassociating realities of the world he faces. Understood thus, Ishmael’s apparent strangeness within the narrative of Moby‐Dick may be more usefully understood as the ultimate manifestation of a complex, purposeful, and long‐running evolution.