Because Ishmael plays a minor role in the plot, early critics of Moby-Dick assumed that Captain Ahab was the protagonist.

In addition to explicitly philosophical references, in Chapter 89, for instance, he expounds on the legal concept, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish", which he takes to mean that possession, rather than a moral claim, bestows the right of ownership.

After several voyages in the merchant service, he decides to sail as a green hand on a whaling ship, leaving from Nantucket.

In his quest for revenge Ahab has lost all sense of responsibility, and when the whale sinks the ship and destroys the whaleboats, all crewmembers drown with the exception of Ishmael: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

"[a] A life buoy fashioned from Queequeg's coffin[b] bobs up to the surface, and Ishmael keeps himself afloat on it until another whaling ship, the Rachel, arrives to rescue him.

In 21:6-21, the most significant verses for Melville's allegory,[4] Hagar was cast off after the birth of Isaac, who inherited the covenant of the Lord instead of his older half-brother.

Matthiessen complained as early as 1941 that "most of the criticism of our past masters has been perfunctorily tacked onto biographies" and objected to the "modern fallacy" of the "direct reading of an author's personal life into his works.

The reader is not told how long after the voyage Ishmael begins to tell his adventure, the second sentence's "some years ago" being the only clue.

The beginning of the book is "comedy" in which anxious Ishmael and serene Queequeg "bed down, get 'married,' and take off on a whaling adventure come-what-may."

[16] Narrator-Ishmael demonstrates "an insatiable curiosity" and an "inexhaustible sense of wonder", says Bezanson,[17] but has not yet fully understood his adventures: "'It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

Earlier critics charged that Melville did not pay a great deal of attention to point of view, "and of course this is true" in Henry James's sense of the technique, yet Ishmael-narrator's "struggle" with the shaping of his narrative, "under constant discussion, is itself one of the major themes of the book."

Ishmael deploys among other genres and styles, a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, an emblematic reading.