“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 3): Ishmael praises whaling using internal dialogue, typical of multiple personality

In Chapter 24, “The Advocate,” Ishmael argues for the importance of whaling. He says that whaling has famous chroniclers, honorable family connections, statutory respectability, historical grandeur, and dignity.

The issue in this post is not what he says about whaling, but how he goes about saying it: He states his case in a chapter with an imaginary dialogue (1, pp. 165-171). For example:

“Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.”

“Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial. By old English statutory law, the whale is declared ‘a royal fish’.”

“Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.”

“The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon entering the world’s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession” (1, p. 170).

Ishmael could have made exactly the same points without the imaginary dialogue. But that is how his mind works. He has a “dialogic imagination,” a concept that Mikhail Bakhtin (2) used to explain Dostoevsky (search past posts on “Dostoevsky” and “Dostoevsky duality”), author of The Double.

Anyone can have an internal dialogue occasionally; e.g., if you are thinking about what you should have said to a real person or what you should say to a real person in the future. But Ishmael’s dialogue on whales sounds like a debate with an alternate personality.

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin