Ahab & Merleau-Ponty....Graves....

[Terrance]

> 
> Perhaps not, but it's important to get the basics straight, as I think you'd
> agree. And, as many others here have noted there is another narrator
> narrating Wicks in _M&D_, and one point I would make from this is that
> Melville and Ishmael are in much greater philosophical alignment than Wicks
> and Pynchon are in their respective texts.

I don't know how you make this point. How does one go about
demonstrating that Ishmael's philosophy is closer to Melville's
philosophy than Wick's philosophy is to Pynchon's? 



I would say, it is a mistake to try to argue that either Wicks or
Ishmael (both unreliable narrators) is aligned philosophically with the
authors of their respective texts.  


That being said, I think it is possible to discover the applied author
of both of these texts and to demonstrate that the philosophies of the
"basic" narrators (Ishmael and Wicks) of both M-D and M&D are not those
of the authors.