Reading through Moby-Dick, I can’t help but remember my own childhood. My mother dated a fisherman for ten years and I was raised with this reverence for the sea, a deep love and respect for the ocean, and an overwhelming fear in the water. A boat is only as sturdy or strong as you’re willing to believe it to be as you roll from end to end in the cabin above the bunks. Sleep is as guaranteed as the fish caught and food, if it stays down, is typically whatever is smallest and easiest to make, not necessarily what is healthiest.

            In these chapters, chapter seven in particular, I remember the fear I had every night, wondering if my mother’s boyfriend would be coming home or if he would be lost to the seas he loved more than anything. As he stares at the plaques commemorating those lost to the sea, Ishmael reflects on his own mortality, telling himself, “Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine” (Melville 42). In this self-reflection, Ishmael shares with the audience a quick window into his vulnerability. Ishmael does not often give us a view into himself so vulnerably, at least never purposefully. When he speaks of the melding of blankets and hands when he was younger, he is trying to find the words to speak what it was that happened to him rather than him sharing a memory for the sole aspect of shared vulnerability, writing, “My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them” (Melville 28). He feels compelled to explain what it was that reminded him of this peculiar experience, but ultimately not finding the right words to fully convey the sensation, only restating what the moment was.

This quick window into Ishmael, despite how vulnerable or accidental it may be, is over just as quickly as he bares it, writing, “…fine chance for a promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet” (Melville 42). Ishmael, and like many seaman before and after him, including my mother’s now ex-boyfriend, he becomes giddy at this idea, this romanticised death by the thing they loved doing most; for Ishmael, whaling, for we know how honourable he views whaling to be; for my mother’s ex, it was about the mutual respect, about dedicating your entire life to something and, at the end, being admired and taken in, rather than being taken out; being accepting and becoming one with the waters he sailed and worked on all his life, never to be seen as lost at sea, lost to her icy grip, a man who has “…placelessly perished without a grave” (Melville 41).