Irreconcilable Differences: Voice, Trauma, and Melville's Moby-Dick

This essay argues that Ishmael's implausible narration in Moby-Dick (with its evident concealments, inventions, and fantasies) results from his status as a traumatized survivor and that through his incoherence, the novel insists that accounts of trauma cannot be subjected to the totalizing schemata of narrative aesthetics or therapeutic teleology.