MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as narrators

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Rob wrote:

> There is no intervening narrative agency between Melville and Ishmael in
> _MD_.

What about chapters 37-39? They are being told from the inner POV of Ahab,
Starbuck, and Stubb. Quite modernist, I'd say.

> By contrast, the interaction and conversations in the Philadelphia
> drawing room scenes in _M&D_ are obviously narrated by an agency *outside*
> Wicks. Further, even those episodes which Wicks *is* ostensibly narrating
> contain events, descriptions and ideas that Wicks could not have witnessed,
> has not been told of, or which are otherwise beyond the scope of his
> purview. This is not the case with Ishmael in Melville's text.

Yes it is. And fairly often so. Apart from chapters 37-39 compare, and I am merely
skipping through the book at random, the beginning of Chapter 44. In the fourth
paragraph, for example, it says ""But not so did it seem to Ahab", who is alone in
his cabin. Certainly an omniscient narrator? Look at chapters 120 to 122, at
Chapter 127 ("Ahab to himself."), at Chapter 129 etc. etc. "Moby Dick" may be
mainly told from Ishmael's POV, but we also have the personal POV, drama with stage
directions and all, and quite frequently an omniscient narrator who is not Ishmael.
In other words: There is an intervening narrative agency between Melville and
Ishmael, and some scenes in MD "are obviously narrated by an agency *outside*"
Ishmael.

> I said that I think Ishmael
> is in much greater philosophical alignment with his author than Wicks is
> with his. And I've also said that I think the way narrative is articulated
> in _M&D_ is dissimilar to that of _Moby Dick_.

Generally, this is my impression too. Most of the time Melville's POV seems to be
pretty close to Ishmael's.

Perhaps it is just the explicit irony, the foregrounding of the "narratedness"
(hope this sounds postmodernist and not silly) of the story of M & D that allows
Pynchon to frequently make Cherrycoke a spokesman for some opinions he himself may
hold? Pure speculation, of course.

In terms of tone, if not in terms of "the way the narrative is articulated", I
think GR is much closer to MD than M&D. The real predecessor for the narrative
trickery of M&D to me still seems to be "Tristram Shandy", written, coincidentally,
during the time Mason and Dixon were in America, drawing that line.

Thomas

P.S. Sorry about the mix-up, Otto and Kai.