Call Me Fedallah: Reading a Proleptic Narrative in Moby-Dick

Fedallah’s role in Moby-Dick may be considered a “proleptic narrative” suppressed not only in Ishmael’s story of survival but also in the scholarship on Melville’s novel. Fedallah’s role is often perceived to be categorically limited as a self-sacrificial prophet of doom piloting Ahab’s soul, and the Pequod’s body, to damnation. Although Fedallah has been dehumanized in the long aftermath of the self-perpetuating narrative voice “Call me Ishmael” and marginalized through decades of scholarly silence, we can discern his textual presence through an analysis that retraces the few steps he takes and listens to the few words he articulates. Opening with an emancipating account of Fedallah’s role in the chapter “Leg and Arm,” followed by an equally subversive reading of “The Whale Watch,” a chapter that contains the only fully externalized case of the character engaging in a verbal exchange, I argue that the Parsee is not so much a baffling Mephistopheles as a lone drifter with an untold story, summed up in his life-affirming cry to Ahab, “Take another pledge, old man.”

The capacity for Moby-Dick to be read as a polysemous allegory is evident from the first chapter, “Loomings,” where Ishmael prepares his reader for the voyage ahead by stressing the importance of “the invisible police officer of the Fates” to his narrative (Norton MD 15). The Fates, we are meant to believe, have ordained both Ishmael’s initial urge to “quietly take to the ship” (12), as well as his eventual survival as he “escaped alone to tell” us (470). Yet the adventure, however foreordained, is only a “brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances” of Providence:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”

(Norton MD 16)

Ishmael’s “VOYAGE”—or, by extension, narrative—appears in uppercase, at the center of the page, between two historical events: a US presidential election and most likely the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–1842. Shortly after opening with “Call me Ishmael” (Norton MD 12), the narrator invokes the historically situated setting of world politics, asserting his authority over the reader’s perception of the world in Moby-Dick. Ishmael’s “bill” of Providence can also be reimagined from the vantage point of Fedallah, Ahab’s Parsee companion. For readers in present-day Iran, where the fictional character Fedallah’s historical roots converge, the enjoyment of Ishmael’s words may be overshadowed either by the “Grand Contested Election” of Barack Obama, whose crippling economic sanctions against a (might-be) nuclear Iran have for long been a subject of debate (Sanger), or by a “BLOODY BATTLE” against Terror that continues to affect the region’s neighbors through drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan (Nordland). Ishmael’s voyage resonates with intimations for present-day readers, and Melville’s recourse to history can be understood in relation to what Mikhail Bakhtin terms “the present in all its open-endedness” (108).

The Parsee’s role has rarely been a contested issue in Melville scholarship. Often treated as Ahab’s menacing but submissive Mephistopheles (Matthiessen 442, Moretti 33), Fedallah is a minor character mystified and misrepresented within the murky space between appearance and reality by both the novel’s narrator and critics. What he is and what he appears to be, what he utters and what he is heard to say, what he does and what he is thought to have done, and whom he befriends and whom he is believed to betray are all lost in a distrustful atmosphere wherein the members of the crew need desperately to come to terms with Ahab’s monomania. Fedallah is therefore identified under the piercing gaze of the crew as, in Ishmael’s phrase, “a muffled mystery to the last” (Norton MD 270), or, in Starbuck’s words, as Ahab’s “evil shadow” extending towards the Pequod’s destruction (459).

Fictional characters and actual scholars have tended to confirm each other’s views of Fedallah. Timothy Marr recently has pointed to Melville’s implication in the self-serving...