In chapter two, Ishmael describes The Spouter Inn as “a queer sort of place – a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft.” […]
Ishmael
From the first sentence of the novel, the reader knows Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, whose motive for his time on the sea is to escape civilization. He says it is his “substitute for pistol and ball,” revealing violent tendencies. GENESIS 16 and GENESIS 21 : 9-21 introduce Ishmael as the child of Abraham (Abram) and Hagar…