(Not) Talking About Trauma

Or why would Ishmael ever ship out again?

Toward the end of Moby-Dick's  Ch. 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," our narrator, Ishmael, interrupts himself to address the reader: "But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael." In invoking his own name, and in the mention of the dreaded hypo, or bout of depression, this passages brings us back to the first paragraph of Chapter 1,  Loomings, where we learned that the story was all a recounting of a voyage Ishmael took years before.

There's precious little backstory on Ishmael in Moby-Dick, but we do learn in Chapter 1 that he set out to go whaling because he was depressed and trying not to let his "hypos get such an upper hand" of him. We aren’t told why he was depressed. We intuit from the fact of Ishmael’s telling the story that he will survive, but not what what he survived. Nonetheless, gradually, before the famous ending is revealed, we start to see evidence of Ishmael’s trauma.

Cannibalism, for example, is mentioned thirty-three times in Moby-Dick. Take this passage from Ch. 58, "Brit": "the universal cannibalism of the sea ... do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?" or the reference in chapter 65, "The Whale as a Dish": "Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?" Melville was inspired to write Moby-Dick in part by the story of the whaleship Essex, which in 1820 was stove in by a sperm whale. Melville had read the narratives of two of the five survivors describing the cannibalism that kept them alive on an open whaleboat for the three months till they were rescued. (This story is told brilliantly by Nathaniel Philbrick in his book In the Heart of the Sea.) Melville did not write such a cannibalistic horror story into Moby-Dick. Ishmael is picked up relatively swiftly by the Rachel at the end, rather than having to survive on an open whaleboat by eating human flesh, but he is still a survivor of the traumatic loss of all his shipmates. That trauma echoes Ahab's past one, in which he lost his leg to Moby-Dick, but so does his quite surprising continued interest in whaling, in the wake of such a terrible voyage. It is not just Ahab who is a monomaniacal white-whale-obsessed nut job for returning to whaling after suffering grievously on prior voyage but Ishmael for repeatedly returning to sea. If "Cetology" didn't prove it, "The Whiteness of the Whale" makes it undeniable that our narrator, Ishmael, too, is obsessed — and clearly triggered — by whiteness as a result of the trauma he has experienced. Narratively, Melville introduces great complexity and interest by having Ishmael, his Narrator/hero, share this key personality trait with Ahab, the villain/antagonist, and one of the ways it’s expressed is through his continual return to the notion of cannibalism.

PROMPT: Consider a character's deepest, darkest, most shameful or terrifying moment, their unmentionable and unforgettable secret. Depending on the story, this could be the murder of a king, the betrayal of a friend, a lie, an act of omission, a deception, a petty theft, or perhaps it's an inherited trauma. Next, consider the very specific ways your character would avoid thinking about this bad stuff. Ishmael's obsession with cannibalism comes out mostly in the form of a lot of cannibal jokes. And then there's his absolute fascination with and horror of the color white.... It is not merely a set of philosophical musings on Whiteness, it's about Ishmael.  As dangerous as Moby-Dick may be, his albinism is actually not the part of him that makes him dangerous. That's deflection. So for the prompt, focus on what your character's greatest trauma deflects to.