MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as narrators

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Rob wrote:

> Again, the "I" in Chapter 45 sounds suspiciously like Ishmael to my ear. It
> may not be, but Ishmael and this narrator certainly share similar interests,
> attitudes, opinions, perceptions of Ahab, and are acutely self-conscious of
> the role of narrator they have assumed. If not one and the same, they are
> very closely-aligned.

I don't dispute their close alignment. It is just that, when you take a close look,
there are various narrative agencies. Of course, from a more general perspective one
may subsume them all under Ishmael's POV, who would then be the narrator of the
whole novel, either relating his experience or letting his imagination fly. In
contrast to M&D, though, in MD it is never mentioned that Ishmael's story is full of
imaginative embellishments.

> Yes, the same playscript format reappears at intervals throughout the text.
> I guess my point is that Ishmael is very conscious of these apparent shifts
> in the way the narrative is articulated, whereas the conversations in the
> Philadelphia drawing room in _M&D_ simply intrude abruptly, seemingly
> spontaneously, unbidden by and unbeknownst to Wicks. And even within the
> substantive content of what is supposed to be Wicks's narration there are
> events and incidents, let alone attitudes and allusions, which come from
> vantages that are well outside his frame of reference.

But in the case of Wicks it is made clear from the beginning that he embellishes his
narrative at will, whereas this is not the case with Ishmael. Does not this make the
narration of events Wicks can not possibly have witnessed, more plausible, in terms
of cohesiveness of the narrative as a whole, instead of less?

> So I don't think narrative agency is ever "outside" Ishmael in the same way
> that it is extraneous to Wicks in _M&D_.

Yes, it is clear that there is a narrator different from Wicks in M&D whereas, if we
assume that the whole of MD is told from Ishmael's POV, excessive implausabilities
not withstanding, in Melville's book we have only one narrator.

> I'd say that the ironic distance between Pynchon and Wicks is considerable,
> and that the intervening narrative agency is a more clearly-defined and
> conspicuous category in _M&D_ than in _Moby Dick_.

Yes.

> I think the way that the fictional tale of 'The Ghastly Fop' becomes
> enmeshed in the "real" exploits of Mason and Dixon - the ontological
> destabilisation this enacts - is very reminiscent of _Don Quixote_. I also
> think there are similarities in tone, in the attributes and relationship of
> the central duo, and in the picaresque mode and mood of the narrative.

Yes, DQ as well. But neither Cervantes nor Sterne do ever go as far as P. There is
never a complete breakdown of "ontological boundaries" or some such - Amadis de Gaul
does never enter the narrative of Don Quijote. As for "similarities in tone" etc., I
agree completely.

> But now I'm a little confused about what you mean by the "implied narrator".
> I'd taken it to refer to what I would call unidentified or unattributed
> narrative agency within the text, such as that voice which describes how
> Wicks "has linger'd" at the LeSparks', how "he had intended to be gone weeks
> ago, but finds he cannot detach", and not to Wayne Booth's concept of the
> "implied author", what Booth envisages as a "created 'second self'", or the
> "implied-image of the artist". Booth: "'Persona, 'mask', and 'narrator' are
> sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker of the work who
> is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author and who
> may be separated from him by large ironies." (Booth, _The Rhetoric of
> Fiction, 73)

You're right, I was using those terms too loosely. The implied narrator would be the
one perhaps present in MD and certainly present in M&D. Booth's implied author is
always there.

Thomas