Ishmael

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is what, this is the sort of, these are the gay sex movies we think that Queequeg and Ishmael may have used in the Nantucket Hotel.

Yeah, so Ishmael is in One Nation.

That's true.

In fact,

So the main character is a trans woman.

And she, instead of Ishmael, it's I.

Instead of Ahab, it's A.

Instead of Kwee Kwek, it's Q.

And I thought, you know, I want to skip this.

You know, like there's this iconic line, call me Ishmael at the beginning of Moby Dick.

And I thought I should just get to the story.

But then I was like, well, Melville's probably wiser than I am.

But the Moby Dick comparison is really helpful there, I think.

Yeah, I think that's a really nice way to put it.

Like one of the most beautiful lines in the opening paragraph of chapter one talks about this damp, drizzly November in his soul, in Ishmael's soul.

And he seems to be the main character in And narrator in Moby Dick seems to be potentially suicidal at the beginning.

And so all of his books included biblical themes, and all of his books included biblical names.

So if we look at Moby Dick, the protagonist, the hero of the story, the narrator as well, his name is Ishmael.

While we all know who Ishmael was, that was the illegitimate outcast son of Abraham.

The captain of the ill-fated ship, his name was Ahab, Captain Ahab, named after King Ahab, the most wicked king in Israel's history.

Then you've got the owner of the ship, whose name was Bildad.

There's another character called, you'll get this one, Elijah.

Elijah, of course, was the prophet in the days of the wicked king of Ahab.

And Elijah, this friend of Ishmael, warns him not to go on this sailing, whaling mission because it's going to be doomed and ill-fated.

That's chapter 19.

If you've read the novel, uh, you can recall that before Ishmael and Queequeg get on the Pequod, they are accosted by a beggar in the street, and his name is Elijah.

And he warns them in very cryptic language about what they've actually signed away when they signed the papers to board the Pequod.

And he suggests that what they've signed away is their souls, not just the couple of years of their life.

He had been holding his hat in his hands, and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate." He offers them these portentous sayings, like this last little epigram about, uh, the tavern and the road thereto, and he uses this archaic language.

Moby Dick's Mennonite, I mean Moby Dick's prophet, who occupies the same structural spot, accosting the main characters as they go out on their journey, is much more playful.

He is, uh, berated by Ishmael for pretending to have a big secret, for speaking as if he had a secret to tell, but not telling it.

So McCarthy takes the model and transforms it slightly, brings it into a realm where sincerity and depth and fear replace the inklings of fear around a core of

Captain Ahab walked the decks of the Pequod with an ivory stump, where Moby Dick took off his leg when last they met.

The tale is told by Ishmael.

Pray gaunt Ahab pacing the tilting quarterdeck, his slim white ivory leg pounding an eternal thumping rhythm, searching, hunting the enemy that robbed him of his leg, Across the storm-tossed ocean, round the horn through the Indian seas and out upon the broad Pacific.

Close on the foam-clashed wake of Moby Dick, the monstrous white whale.

The End The drama's done.

Why then here does anyone step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.

I, Ishmael, floated in the wreckage at the margin of the vortex...

And when the half-spent suction of the ship reached me and drew me round and round to the center of the slowly wheeling circle, it had subsided to a creamy pool.

[laughs]

... happening, you know? So in this chapter, um, Ishmael is walking out of a cold rain into the local chapel, which is getting ready for service.

Um, I'm not sure which flavor of Protestant everyone is.

Uh, we can look that up later.

They're just like a memorial.

They're for people whose bodies were not recovered.

Um, Ishmael reflects that you're lucky, uh, if your grave contains your body, that that's sort of a luxury not afforded by everyone.

But he also thinks about kind of the flawed way that people might think about their souls or to sort of think about, um, your true self while on Earth, and that the body is not the true self.

Give me some time to throw the man down.

Call me Ishmael.

Some years ago in the 1840s, having little money in my pocket and nothing to interest me on shore, I took myself to the old island of Nantucket.

A heap of sand anchored off New England returns its weight in whale oil every year.

Now

then, drink! Death to Moby Dick! Swear ye harpooners! Death to Moby Dick! Death to Moby Dick! Death to Moby Dick!

I, Ishmael, shouted for the rest.

And stronger I shouted because of the bread in my soup.

Doing setological stuff.

Ishmael is going on, you know, all of his philosophical, you know, tangents.

Ahab is continuing to be super normal.

And so, yeah, but, you know, I think we, again, we've learned our lesson from the first two episodes.

And then it moves fast when we're in a plot-centered chapter.

But really, it's a little bit misleading to draw that line too strictly.

Because as we see, the monkey rope, the chapter we're going to start with right now, He's mainly just explaining to us this particular convention, thus in the whaling industry, much like Ishmael has been doing several times already.

You know, telling us about the crotch and the dart and the line.