H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e2 4called by a nickname, as in ‘My real name is Algernon Digby-
Stuart, but you can call me Lulu.’ One normally does this for the
convenience of others. It would sound strange to say ‘My real name
is Doris, but you can call me Quentin Clarence Esterhazy the
Third.’ ‘Ishmael’, however, doesn’t sound like much of a nickname.
So one assumes that it is either the narrator’s real name, or that it is
a pseudonym he has chosen to signify his status as a wandering
outcast. If this is the case, then he is concealing his actual name
from us, and doing so just at the moment when he seems most
intimate and inviting. The fact that the Western world is not
exactly stuffed to the rafters with people called Ishmael, as opposed
to people called Doris, seems to confirm the point.
‘Call me Ishmael’ is an address to the reader, and like all such
addresses it gives the fictional game away. Simply to acknowledge
the presence of a reader is to confess that this is a novel, which
realist novels are usually reluctant to do. They generally try to
pretend that they are not novels at all but true- life reports. To recog-
nise the existence of a reader is to risk ruining their air of reality.
Whether Moby- Dick is an unqualifiedly realist work is another
question, but it is realist for enough of the time to make this
opening gambit untypical of the book as a whole. For a novelist to
write ‘Dear reader, take pity on this poor blundering fool of a
country doctor’ is implicitly to admit in the phrase ‘Dear reader’
that there is no actual country doctor at all, blundering or
otherwise – that this is a piece of verbal artifice, not a slice of rural
life. In which case we might well be less inclined to pity the foolish
doctor than if we knew or supposed that he was real. (Some literary
theorists, incidentally, hold that you cannot really pity, admire, fear
or abhor a fictional character, but can only ‘fictionally’ experience
such emotions. People who cling white- faced to each other while