MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as narrators

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> What about the language?
> Pynchon's narrative agency, "the one who narrates Wicks," uses 18th-language
> too like Wicks.
> So of course there is still a big difference between the real living author
> and his narrator.
> 
> Is "Moby Dick" written in the same 19th-century English the author Melville
> has spoken?
> 


No it is not. Moby-Dick, like parts of Wick's narrative and more like
Wick's spiritual day book and sermons, is written in the style of
popular sermon, like Walt Whitman's poetry and Emily
Dickenson's--adaptations or secularizations of hymns and sermons. 
Melville did not speak like Ishmael or Father Mapple or any preacher,
but he sometimes wrote letters wherein the religious symbolism, biblical
allusion,  rhetorical devices and style are sermonized. 

So again, we have a similarity, but also a  difference.