Ishmael, or The Artist

I know what Ahab’s aim is—but what is Ishmael’s?

“Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color... God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates” (220).

Ahab’s aim is ruinously simple: conquest, vengeance, the fulfillment of an obsession that has already eaten away the man beneath it. His thinking becomes a vulture that gnaws eternally at his heart. But Ishmael—what is he aiming at? What sustains him across the voyage?

His aim may be artistry in the purest sense. He would not have us chasing a living whale, much less a man-made image of one, because he seems to believe that our appetites are satisfied only moment to moment, never eternally. His artistry is satirical in its form, but the heart of it is sincere. If the structure of Moby-Dick is hard to collect without spilling over—without losing Ishmael’s cross-genre, improvisational entries—the center is nonetheless diamond. He is preaching to us, yet he buries his exhortations so deeply that the reader must excavate, polish, and set each gem against a gloomy, overserious backdrop. Only then does he wink at us—sometimes just when we think we have grasped the truth.

I wonder whether even he is entirely convinced of his own words. Perhaps he knew they would seem, at times, solipsistic or spiritually vague, and he wanted to pre-empt the mockery. It may be that Ishmael poses his artistry with a kind of self-deprecating courage, offering a serious heart under the protection of his slyness. If his satire is a mask, it is one through which his face still shines.

I began my search for Ishmael’s purpose determined not to betray him—determined, that is, not to let my scholar’s hammer ring against the hull in search of some neat allegorical cargo. It is too easy, I kept reminding myself not to wonder what is the allegory in everything—Who is the Whale? What is Queequeg?—and thereby to wander listlessly as if in a dream about the stage. Yet that wariness, I now see, is really Ishmael’s own manifesto. It is he, not I, who warns against turning living experience into a taxidermied emblem. Allegory is not outlawed because symbols are false, but because symbols can ossify; names harden, and mystery is lost. The diamond center cannot be reached that way. Allegorical certainty would only fracture what Ishmael’s book asks the reader to reflectively endure.

Allegory and the Diamond Center

But he is an artist. And it is my experience, as an artist myself, that I rarely—practically never—meet other artists who are not totally possessed by the form of things. In the best case, their works glimmer with proofs of their own depths in spite of themselves. Such artists live as aesthetes skimming surfaces. When they use words, they borrow from contemporary philosophers to describe the world in ways that mirror their peers, their age, their inherited clichés. They do not describe the world as it must appear to someone who has thought, suffered, and submitted to it. These artists are lashed to one another and to the shifting tides of taste, like rafts adrift on a sea of borrowed symbols. They echo each other not out of conviction but out of fear—fear of saying something out of step, fear of silence, fear of being unpossessed. Their work is a performance of knowing, not a confession of having come to know through pain. It is manner without marrow.

What, then, is the opposite? A good artist is possessed not by fashion but by reality. He risks unfashionable speech; he speaks from wounds; he invents form out of marrow; he holds mystery without apology. His labor is confession, not performance—truth gained at the cost of blood and sleep. If the possessed aesthete floats on borrowed rafts, the good artist builds a ship plank by plank from the timber of his own sufferings. Ishmael, by contrast with the borrowed-raft makers, speaks as one who has suffered, who has submitted—not to fashion but to the deep. His style is extravagant, yes, but its excesses are born of struggle, not vanity; they pulse with the rough heartbeat of surviving wonder.

Yet his style is also defensive. To pre-empt being tied into the same lines, Ishmael sprawls across every genre—sermon, treatise, epic, tragedy, farce. He flexes an encyclopedic mind to avoid being caught by any single fashionable net; he outpaces the clever reader before he can be caught and categorized.

The Counter-Performance

He rejects the illusion of self-sufficiency, yet accepts that no human life can be wholly unpossessed; his answer is to turn possession outward, making the very act of being claimed a public confession.

Ishmael jokes that “often possession is the whole of the law” (434). What he exposes is that possession governs whalers, philosophers, preachers alike. Although his posture appears defensive, I do not think he actually escapes the logic of possession. His strategy, rather, is radical exposure: make himself eminently visible and honest—not in every word, but in the total pattern. Ahab has created a monster that feeds on his own heart, victim undying, vulture unsated; perhaps Ishmael’s art is a counter-performance: to open his own chest and show the world what consumes his heart. The revelation is not purely personal. By exposing the devouring thing in himself, he calls his whole community of readers—and the literal crew around him—to reckon with their shared complicity in the hunt.

Chapel

To test that claim we return to Ishmael’s earliest set piece, the Whaleman’s Chapel, where he introduces his preferred lens—melancholy, communal solitude, spiritual distrust:

“A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable…” (39)

The scene is more than picturesque. It reveals that every private sorrow forms an island, yet those islands lie in the same stormy sea. Community, in Ishmael’s telling, is built not on warm fellowship but on the grudging recognition that we suffer our separate griefs beneath a common gale.

“In what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead... But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope” (42).

Faith itself scavenges among the ruins of certainty. It has to scavenge—and there’s something actively desperate about that searching. Ishmael, in this great work of art, gives a window onto that search and what fuels it. We are witnesses to his way or mode of being in the world, if only we can be sensitive enough to it.

Philosophers

Insensitivity, insincerity, and inauthenticity are flaws that all weave a similar cable to catch us and drag us under. Ishmael uses satire only perhaps as a mirror, a way of showing us these flaws that would otherwise be hidden under the flattering light of our ideals and symbols. When Ishmael tells how an elephant was led out to honor Alexander the Great, the reader is set up for awe, only for Ishmael to turn the image inside out, mocking our instinct to crown what we cannot understand.

He is, in part, the sad clown. His satire is woven into every register of the story—whether in death rites, philosophy, or heroism—all the supposedly deeper symbols that would have us boasting of our understanding and thereby revealing our flaws as being scored onto our diamond surfaces.

If we are to reflect, he teaches us, we are to do so with authenticity and purity of heart.

I wonder whether he targets philosophers with this mirror, revealing their flaws, as often as he does because they work within a tradition that cannot give up its symbols. It is fine to use the same materials to which we are all limited; it is no less honorable to limit one’s expression to the rules of a traditional formalism that, like a complementary frame, does not subtract from the painting it surrounds but may even enhance it. There’s no less authentic exercise, though, than to experience the real thing, the real mystery in the world, and then to think one has possessed something of its image in a gollum. In other words, the work of the artist should be no less real than the experience that inspired the artist. This is only achievable if we understand that we see through the art to the spirit that animates its creator. We resonate with the living and moving, not with the static; a still life of a whale is unrecognizable to a man like Ishmael. What more artful performance could Ishmael give, then, than to bleed onto the page the way he does?

The greater value in a living philosopher therefore is the same as that which makes any living creature valuable. It is not his expert manipulation of symbols to convey meaning in a new way; it is the ineffable mystery in him, the spirit of living itself.

The amateur philosopher, on the other hand, might collect the ideas of philosophers as they’ve been honed and traded down the centuries and think he has taken possession of something essential to life. But no idea is essential to life—nothing stored in the pyramidical head is enough to communicate in a resonant way. As Ishmael observes:

“So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right” (357).

And again, mocking the dangers of philosophical sweetness: “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?” (377)

The intellect, untested by suffering, becomes a shared narcotic. The three passages together trace a single arc: isolated griefs held in silence, a congregation scavenging among tombs for scraps of meaning, and finally, a fellowship of thinkers seduced by sweetness and lulled into ruin. At each station, Ishmael presses us to see what we would rather overlook: that our deepest errors—our postures of reverence, our intellectual vanities, even our moral consolations—are not private missteps but entangled in a web of collective guilt and shared agency. That web binds human beings more surely than any chosen creed, more deeply than any voluntary covenant.

The Final Drift

I do not think he is only referring to academic philosophers who have drunk deeply of Plato’s works; he’s also referring to any man who would seek fulfillment—or happiness, maybe—in supposedly higher or transcendent things. Yet, whereas Ishmael does not explicitly despise thought itself, he nevertheless hints that he may despise some way of thinking: not thought as inquiry, but thought as allegiance, as misplaced faith in the sufficiency of our own mental constructions. Faith that our thoughts will bear sweeter fruit than the physical world can give.

Returning to the epigraph, Ishmael does not want to be the man “whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus…” There’s something about the intensity of the thinking that is self-consuming. The act itself may be benign; it is the mode in which one thinks that becomes dangerous.

The kind of spiritual entanglement that Ahab embodies is possession by “malicious agencies” (200) within him that tear him apart. I’m struck by the possibility that he speaks not only of his own self-sabotage but of real spiritual entities—haunting intelligences that turn a man in on himself, using his own inner voice against him, accusing him of being what they are: a liar, untrustworthy.

If this is so, then Ishmael and Ahab might be seen in a new light—as victims of uncontrollable forces. In that case, Ishmael, the artist, is like one suffering from a terrible disease presenting himself in all his horror to a theater of medical students (us readers), not only that they might be vexed or awestruck at how pitiable he is, but also with at least a faint hope that some good will come of his suffering.

Starbuck, caught within Ahab’s pull, is also a victim: “My whole clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again” (184). And grimly: “Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s” (230).

They are tied to one another and drawn to their collective doom. I have often wondered about this question of collective guilt, or collective agency, and I have already begun to at least obliquely gesture toward Ishmael’s rejection of solipsism or an overweening individualism. Just as he expresses himself artfully in the sardonic, he also expresses himself in a way that reveals a woundedness that puts him in the same boat as Ahab–perhaps along with all the rest of us as unknowing passengers. It is always the mode, posture, or way of being, in other words, that I wish to study in Ishmael.

Furthermore, if we are all passengers, Ishmael assures us that he is present in the storm with us, but he wishes to give us a demonstration of how to find and maintain peace within chaos. “Amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy” (424–425).

The storms that buffet can even serve our inner calm if we consider the role they play in our perception. Without the dark, there is no light; without the corruption there is no healing; without the moribund flesh there is nothing miraculous in the spirit: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold; for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself” (59).

The incorruptible is not found by climbing out of corruption, but by being born within it: “Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing?” (448) Ishmael steals the ambergris from the heart of a putrefying corpse, just as I steal every bit of pleasure from creation that I can in the time I’m continually given, moment by moment, each second as contingent as I am. Does he know he is a thief, too? I don't think so; I think he pursues pleasure as if it were the end of art itself. I think he eschews the moral questions and finds total, unerring—because unquestioned—satisfaction, subsumed in the momentary bliss of a fleeting high.

By doing this, though, he opens a window onto something terrible; even our symbols of perfection—diamonds, whiteness—bear within them the seeds of terror: “The evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell” (451).

Within the corrupt there is perfection; within the perfect, what we witness strikes our hearts with terror. Perhaps this is the price of beauty unmoored from goodness: it blinds, it burns, it overwhelms. Ishmael does not try to reconcile this. He simply turns our gaze to it, again and again. He steals his ambergris, sings his observations, and asks no pardon—neither from heaven nor from the reader. And in that refusal, we see the shape of his art: not innocent, not redemptive, but undeniably alive.

In the end, Ishmael points to the ordinary, the humble: “Man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country” (456).

So he doesn’t give up possession at all, does he? He only lowers the bar for what felicity is attainable. What does he want from the wife and the heart, if it is an unreflective possession of them?

On the contrary, there are, he intones, divine intuitions—“heavenly rays”—that now and then shoot through his doubt (409), and sometimes even an “enchanted calm” at the center of upheaval (422). There must be more than the material pursuits of pleasure which he glories in. But none of these visions last. None resolve. And none offer a clear direction forward.

And so, the voyage remains incomplete:

“The world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete…” (45)

Where the voyage ends must be in one’s death, but that isn’t taken as seriously as it might have been had he been willing to consider the permanency of death and how it has no light, ambergris, or diamond at the center of it.

At the end of the novel, by floating on Queequeg’s coffin; he clings not to metaphysical certainty, but to whatever joy he can still touch. Yet it is still a kind of clinging. He does not renounce possession; he substitutes a more modest possession for a grander one. He chooses survival over mastery, the warm fireside over the burning stars, but it is still a choice to possess something, to name something as "mine."

Perhaps that is why, even as I admire him, I am unsettled. If the incorruptible joy he glimpses arises only by accident, from moment to moment, stolen like ambergris from the corpse of meaning, then Ishmael's final wisdom is still poised precariously close to despair. He survives not because he has answered the question of life, but because he has learned to live without answering it—and without asking too often whether he should answer it at all.

Thus Ishmael’s aim is no less than to live: to drift, to think without clutching, and to love the world without possessing it—but I cannot understand how this is love at all.

Though it may seem noble at first blush, he has given us a philosophy only possible after inheriting a canonical philosophical tradition. He drives too hard a wedge between the head and the heart, the immanent and the transcendent, la forme et le fond, between thinking and doing. All of these boil down to the life of the mind as distinct from that of the body, and this is a gnostic trap. Ishmael is a great artist and acrobatic encyclopedist—but that is what I come away with in my own reflections on Moby-Dick. I may soon forget the messages, but his beautiful performance has left its marks.

Ishmael has shone a light in spite of himself.

Final Thoughts

In the end, Ishmael’s artistry is both gift and defense—a means of bearing witness without succumbing to the ruinous obsession that consumed Ahab. He escapes this fate not because he transcends suffering or solves its riddles, but because he exposes them with such depth and delicacy that the act itself becomes a kind of survival. His satire does not mock truth; it seeks to preserve it by resisting premature certainty. Each genre he dons is a veil, and yet none fully hide his yearning for meaning. He floats not on faith but on the bare act of narrating—on Queequeg’s coffin turned life-raft, a hollowed relic that, paradoxically, saves him.

Yet if Ishmael is our guide, his guidance is fragile. He teaches us not how to master the storm, but how to drift within it with style, with self-awareness, and without deceit. The cost, however, is clarity. His philosophy gestures toward a kind of joy—momentary, contingent, ironic—but it offers no telos, no guarantee that joy is more than a fleeting gleam in the darkness. If his calm amid the tornado is genuine, it is also solitary. The “eternal mildness” he speaks of may not be eternal at all, but only a pause between tempests. He trades metaphysical conviction for poetic insight, moral confidence for the shimmer of momentary understanding and pleasure. We are left with the beauty of a man who has seen deeply—but not clearly.

That is why, despite the brilliance of his vision, I do not believe Ishmael’s example can suffice. He shows us the perils of too much meaning and the solace of just enough—but not the path to peace. He points to mystery, even to grace, but seems unwilling to name their source. His art is beautiful because it is broken; yet if all he can offer is a performance, a confession without redemption, then his survival is not a solution but a symptom. The artist endures; the reader is moved—but the storm goes on. And the voyage remains, still, incomplete.

Works Cited

Melville, Herman. *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*. Penguin Classics Deluxe Ed., introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick, foreword by Andrew Delbanco, Penguin Books, 2009.