June 23, 2019 - Chapters Thirty-seven, Thirty-eight, and Thirty-nine

These chapters are in the form of dramatic monologues, delivered sequentially by Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb. This is an odd direction for Melville to move in. To this point, the narrative has been entirely Ishmael’s, even in the previous chapter, which had dramatic aspects about it. Here, Ishmael disappears entirely, replaced by a nameless, disembodied third-person narrator or the disintegration of narrative altogether, with a switch in the genre overall. It’s something we will see in later literature (I can think of two works of fiction that use it: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hôtel). I’m sure there are others. Whether Melville is ahead of the curve in bending genre to the extent that he does here I can’t say, although I note that Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, some hundred years earlier, has some of these tricks up its sleeve.