Moby Dick - Slave Narratives

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The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Moby-Dick and American Slave NarrativeAuthor(s): Michael C. BertholdReviewed work(s):Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 135-148Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25090518 .

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Michael C. BertholdMoby-Dick and

American Slave NarrativeIshmael's

cry of "Who aint a slave?" (6) inMoby-Dick's firstchapter plaintively, playfully expresses the textual and

human centrality of enslavement for Melville; but the "Tell methat" that immediately follows the question, Ishmael's directaddress to the readers he constructs as brethren slaves, may bean even more crucial figuring for Melville of inevitable captivesand captivities always being dialogically engaged. This essaywill explore Ishmael's own dialogical engagement with thestrategies and tropes of American slave narratives, particularlyin "The Town-Ho's Story" and the "Epilogue." Generally, I

wish to respond to Henry Louis Gates's notice of the lack ofdiscussion of relationships between slave narratives andAmerican Romanticism (Figures, 50-51) and consider howMoby-Dick might be embedded in what Hortense Spillers hasdescribed as "a potential configuration of slavery's discursivefield" (31). Although some Americanists?who will be cited inthis essay?have speculated on Moby-Dick's politics of slavery,little if any notice has been taken of the novel's affinities withthe genre of the slave narrative, and this argument intends toestablish how the intertextual relations at work here are both

formalistic and thematic.Before and during the Civil War, the whale itself was a

popular symbol for slavery and its prophesied eradication. InRunning a Thousand Miles for Freedom, for example, WilliamCraft uses the whale to condemn various clergymen whosupported the Fugitive Slave Bill and to signify slavery's largerthreat to America's integrity:

These reverend gentlemen pour a terrible cannonade upon"Jonah" for refusing to carry God's message against Nineveh,and tell us about the whale in which he was entombed; whilethey utterly overlook the existence of the whales which troubletheir republican waters, and know not that they themselves are

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The Massachusetts Reviewthe "Jonahs" who threaten to sink the ship of state, by steeringin an unrighteous direction. (324)1

Stephen Butterfield has also documented several instances ofthis iconography. Black New Bedford churches regularlyassociated whaling images with antislavery. An article in theAbolitionist proclaimed:We found the Leviathan weltering in the sea of popularity... We have fixed the harpoon, and the monster begins to blowand bellow. We are now pulling upon the line, and we shall

soon, we trust, come to lancing. (Butterfield, 59)Lincoln, in the Emancipation Proclamation, spoke similarly:

we are like whalers who have been on a long chase. We haveat last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now lookhow we steer, or with one flop of his tail he will send us allinto eternity. (Butterfield, 291)Within Moby-Dick itself, Michael Rogin argues via MichaelGilmore, Ishmael's rescue foretells the emancipation of theslaves (Rogin, 140).2 Ishmael, in fact, is a literal captive of a densering of whales in "The Grand Armada" chapter and is forcedto "watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in;the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up" (387).

Although, as Butterfield has pointed out, Moby-Dick'slanguage tends to be more symbolically freighted than that ofthe slave narratives (36-37), its narrative rhythms recall afundamental rhythm of the slave narrative: a movement orswing between abstract speculations of freedom and palpablechallenges to that freedom. For example, when William WellsBrown is escaping north with his mother, he comforts himself

although the narrative was not published until 1860, the Craftsspoke publicly about their escape from 1849 on. See also Wright forthe argument that "Moby Dick is indeed a 'Job's whale rather thanJonah's'" (194).

2David S. Reynolds also notes of Ishmael's "Who aint a slave"rhetoric that it "would seem to owe much to the attitude of the fieryNew York radical Mike Walsh, who in the 1840s famously universalized the notion of slavery by emphasizing that both Northern wageslaves and Southern chattel slaves were equally exploited" (156).136



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Moby-Dick and American Slave Narrativewith "the thought that I should one day be free, and call mybody my own" (206).3 But as he continues to muse about thebountiful possibilities of a "Free Home," his sentence issuddenly fractured by a comma, a dash, and the jarring phrase"when three men came up on horseback, and ordered us tostop," a phrase which brings his whole paragraph to an abrupthalt (206). Textually, Brown reproduces the disruption he feltat that moment, and by the end of the chapter, he has beenreturned to captivity. Analogous to this disruption is themovement of "The Mat-Maker" chapter of Moby-Dick.

Through his "Loom of Time" metaphor, Ishmael finds somesolace imagining "free will still free to ply her shuttle betweengiven threads" (215). But his meditations are interrupted by acry of " 'There she blows,' " his first lowering for a whale ensues,and, he says, "the ball of free will dropped from my hand" (215).Abstractions on freedom are abandoned for the lust of the hunt,and Ishmael learns quickly that he must "resign" his own life"into the hands of him who steered the boat" (227). Ishmael,of course, has a freedom of movement and a luxury ofspeculation that are unavailable to a William Wells Brown.But there are, at the very least, textual precedents and parallelsfor Moby-Dick's bi-planing of free will and restriction in theslave narratives.

Such connections between Melville and black culture are evenmore pronounced in "The Town-Ho's Story," an interpolatedcaptivity narrative in Moby-Dick that in many ways coincideswith slave narratives. Carolyn Karcher has aptly noted that in"The Town-Ho's Story," Steelkilt, "Lakeman and desperadofrom Buffalo," is a frontier analogue for the African slave, andthat his conflict with Radney, the ship's mate, is "a paradigmof master-slave conflict" and the mutiny in which it culminates"a paradigm of slave insurrection" (57, 58).4 But it is alsoimportant to emphasize that the very textual shape of Melville's

3Originally published in 1847.4Karcher demonstrates throughout her study that Melville"generalized about slavery by analogy" (2). In pointing out affinitiesbetween Steelkilt and Christ, particularly when Steelkilt is"betrayed" in the forecastle by his fellow mutineers, Karcher alsosuggests how "The Town-Ho's Story" fuses Biblical narrative withfrontier and slave narratives.137



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story is analogous to that of the slave narrative.Melville's initial concern in "The Town-Ho's Story" has todo with the actual dissemination of the narrative. The essenceof the story, "the secret part of the tragedy" as Ishmael calls it,"never reached the ears of Captain Ahab" (242) or the captainof the Town-Ho himself. Rather, the story belongs to the underclass, the "private property" of three "confederate" seaman ofthe ship who "communicated it to the Indian Tashtego withRomish injunctions of secrecy" (242). The notion thatnarrativized experience constitutes "private property" echoes,verbatim, James Pennington's internal declaration in TheFugitive Blacksmith (to the slavehunters who want to know whoowns him and where he is from) that "the facts in this case are

my private property" (22).5 In both Pennington and Melville,as Andrews says of The Fugitive Blacksmith, the "declarativeact of defining autobiographical truth as one's inalienableprivate possession" turns chattel logic to one's own advantage(164). This notion is complicated by Ishmael's own receptionof the Town-Ho's story, which he hears much of when Tashtegotalks in his sleep; "when he was wakened," says Ishmael, "hecould not well withhold the rest" (243). That Tashtego issuesthe story out of the depths of sleep perhaps attests both to theintrinsic fascination of the story and to an irresistible need to

pass it on, or perhaps Ishmael coerces it from him. Ishmael, inturn, becomes the story's transmitter when he relates it to a circleof Spanish dons in Lima. On the one hand, he is the vehicle

by which a private captivity narrative is made public, by whichthe narrative is made to cross class and race lines. But in thatthe story was not in fact intended for him, in that he overhears

and appropriates it from Tashtego, his own role as recorder andeditor is itself called into question, and his own relationship to"The Town-Ho's Story" is not unlike, say, that of WilliamLloyd Garrison's to Frederick Douglass's narrative.It is also worth noting that at the end of "The Town-Ho'sStory" Ishmael swears on his "honor" that the story is no fiction:"I know it to be true" (259). Such an avowal is uncharacteristicof Ishmael and points to another parallel between "The TownHo's Story" and slave narratives, which typically begin withdeclarations of and testimonies to their authenticity; for exam

5Originally published in 1849.138



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pie, as Solomon Northup states at the outset of his narrative,"My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts"(227). Ishmael further authenticates his own narrative byclaiming to have actually spoken with Steelkilt; like the slave

narrator, in his zeal to commit himself to his narrative's truthhe proclaims the historical irrefutability of American captivity.The staging of character and conflict in "The Town-Ho'sStory" also parallels that of male slave narratives. Like the maleslave's, Steelkilt's world is essentially one of work, obedience,and humiliation. Radney, for example, exploits Steelkilt's "cor

poreally exasperated state" by commanding him to clean up the"offensive matters" of one of the ship's pigs (246), demasculatingSteelkilt by assigning him a task properly designated only tothe ship's boys. But Steelkilt, like Douglass, for example, in hisautobiography, incarnates a rugged individualism that spurnssuch tyranny and equates floggings with dishonor, and bothmen engage in isolated battles royal with their nemeses thatfunction as ritualized acts of liberation. Douglass describes histhrashing of Mr. Covey, the "nigger-breaker," as "the turningpoint in my career as a slave" (298); Steelkilt nearly kills Radneyafter the mate starts to strike him with a hammer and then leads

a mutiny.The mutiny, as Karcher has pointed out, gives way to a "selfdefeating form of rebellion" in which Steelkilt and his bandagree to be locked in the forecastle "until guaranteed amnesty"(58). But Steelkilt's passivity is not entirely toothless, for in partit serves as a calculated labor strike?a refusal to "sing out forwhales" (254) or do a "hand's turn" (251) of work?that challenges both the personal authority of the captain and thecapitalist mission of the ship.Steelkilt's own personal vendetta against Radney, moreover,is fulfilled by the timely intervention in the story of Moby Dick

who, sighted and pursued by the Town-Ho crew (temporarilyforsaking their strike), seizes Radney in his jaws and plungesto the ocean floor with him. The whale, in fact, seems to be akind of swimming panopticon ever watchful of tyrants likeRadney; the last we see of Radney, in a particularly chillingimage, is the mate's "wildly seeking to remove himself from theeye of Moby Dick" (257).Moby Dick grants Steelkilt a script of

perfect revenge?"complete revenge he had, and without beingthe avenger" (255)?that once again has its counterpart in slave139



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The Massachusetts Reviewliterature. In The Fugitive Blacksmith, especially the secondchapter, Pennington repeatedly wishes that his own escape fromslavery had been morally unambiguous: "See," he apostrophizes, "how human bloodhounds gratuitously chase, catch,and tempt" the runaway slave "to shed blood and lie; how whenhe would do good, evil is thrust upon him" (30). For Steelkilt,this desire for a purity of release, an escape from tyranny withoutrecourse to violence or deceit, is actualized by the appearanceof Moby Dick; as tyrant-killer, the whale seems to restore toSteelkilt his natural

integrityand autonomy. Perhaps Ishmaelhimself needs to believe that Moby Dick sides with the good andthe free; one defense against his own potential captor is to

identify sympathetically with him. In this regard the storyfunctions as captivity wish-fulfillment.Still, to whatever degree "The Town-Ho's Story" might beread as an allegory of oppressor, victim, and savior, its eventsare finally resituated in the quotidian. The slave's freedom is

hardly secured by escape from literal bondage and the arrivalnorth?Douglass has to contend with the economic racism ofNew Bedford, Linda Brent "could not feel safe in New York"and reaches a point where she will not regard "Northern soil"as "free soil" (496, 505); similarly, even after Moby Dick'selimination of Radney, Steelkilt continues to fear "legalretribution" (258) from his captain. By the end of "The TownHo's Story," any sense of Moby Dick as a violent son of libertyis replaced by Radney's widow's dreams of "the awful whitewhale that destroyed him," and Steelkilt's freedom becomes amatter of indeterminacy and disappearance: "Where Steelkiltnow is, gentlemen, none know" (258).

Moby-Dick's most interesting alignment with slave literature,however, occurs in the book's epilogue. Melville's scene ofIshmael, buoyed up by Queequeg's coffin, caps what Gatesidentifies as the "ur-trope of the Anglo-African tradition"(Monkey, 131), the trope of the talking book. This trope

originates in the 1770 narrative of James Albert UkawsawGronniosaw, an African price sold into slavery who eventuallyfinds freedom and Christianity in England. Aboard the slaveship, Gronniosaw observes his Dutch master reading from andapparently conversing with the Bible and wishes the bookwould talk to him as well. But when Gronniosaw opens the

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Moby-Dick and American Slave Narrativebook and puts his ear to it, he is disappointed to find that itwill not speak to him (because, he speculates, he is black). ForGronniosaw, argues Gates, the Bible "constituted a silentprimary text, a text, however, in which the black man foundno echo of his own voice" (Monkey, 136). Subsequently, it isthis "desire for recognition of his self in the text of Westernletters" (Monkey, 137) that motivates his own creation of anarrative. Later black writers (Marrant, Cugoano, Equiano, Jea)refigure Gronniosaw's talking book trope, questioning hisconflation of voice and presence with blackness and absence.InMelville's epilogue, Queequeg's coffin stands as the talkingbook and Ishmael as the Gronniosaw figure. The coffin is

Queequeg's sacred text and co-extensive with his own body. Hecarves its lid, says Ishmael, with "all manner of grotesque figuresand drawings" that are copies of the tattoos on his own body,tattoos that "had been the work of a departed prophet and seerof his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written outon his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, anda mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth" (480). This actof narrative inscription by Queequeg corrects and amplifies anearlier moment where Queequeg is also an author of sorts. Hissigning aboard the Pequod involves the making of a collaborative text with Captain Peleg; on this document, Peleg misrepresents Queequeg as "Quohog," beneath which "appelative"

Queequeg makes his mark, a copy of one of the tattoos on hisarm (89). This splittingof

Queequegbetween a white authori

tarian's primary misrepresentation (and animalizing) of himand his own subordinated attempt at writing himself into theregisters of Western letters is amended when Queequeg designshis coffin; as a solo work that allows him to reproduce hisentire body, rather than one tattoo from his arm, the coffin for

Queequeg is a means of reclaiming the wholeness that theofficial discourse of a Peleg denies him.A prince in his homeland like Gronniosaw, Queequeg abjuresGronniosaw's need to see himself in and speak himself throughthe white man's sacred text. This resistance is in part adumbrated in the negro church in New Bedford where Ishmaelwitnesses a black preacher "beating a book in a pulpit" (10);the book is not even identified as the Bible, and the preacher,a "black Angel of Doom," seems less to take his text from it than141



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parodied by Queequeg at an early moment in the text when,in the Spouter Inn, he takes up a large book and

placing it on his lap began counting the pages with deliberateregularity; at every fiftieth page . . . stopping a moment,looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a longdrawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. (49)

Sundering reading and meaning, reading and revelation,Queequeg objectifies the book?merely a quantifiable bindingof pages?to carnivalize it. Denuding the text, he takes his ownpleasure from it. One of the most memorable aspects of Melville's portrayal of Queequeg is in fact this consistent, unapologetic, playful evasion of the literacy that, claims Gates, is"Western culture's trope of dominance over the peoples of colorit had 'discovered'" (Monkey, 165).The trope of the talking book, Gates makes clear, is "moreproperly the trope of the un-Talking Book" (Monkey, 165). LikeGronniosaw, baffled and compelled by the Bible, Ishmael in theepilogue embraces the coffin-text of Queequeg that he avers isa "riddle to unfold" (480). Like the Bible for Gronniosaw, thecoffin is at once silent and redemptive. It withholds its secretsfrom Ishmael while literally saving him; it neither reflects noracknowledges the white presence before it. Admittedly, as PeterBellis has pointed out, not even Queequeg can read his tattoos,but his hieroglyphics are something other than "a set of emptysigns" (63). The problem here may be one of hermeneutics, butnot of belief; the coffin's hieroglyphics may be incomprehensible, but they are not valueless. They may be a "riddle," but,adds Ishmael, they are a "wondrous work" as well; it is Ahab,not Ishmael, who regards them as "devilish tantalization" (481).

Ishmael, of course, is a more privileged interpreter of the alienthan Gronniosaw. He does not conflate voice and face, as

Gronniosaw does, and attribute the coffin's silence to hiswhiteness; he does not have to master the cunning alphabet

ofQueequeg to articulate himself. Melville's epilogue is remarkable nonetheless for its reversal of the trope of the talking bookand its bold presentation of a white narrator dependent on someuninterpretable but meaningful black text. Not only doesIshmael overcome his initial prejudice against Queequeg?"Icould not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this 'dark

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complexioned' harpooner" (15)?he comes himself to take onattributes of non-whiteness by the book's "Epilogue." Allegorically, in the "Epilogue," Ishmael is in fact quite plainly redeemed from "whiteness" by "blackness;" it is a "black bubble"that bursts and releases the coffin that saves Ishmael fromsinking into the "creamy pool" of the "closing vortex" (573).In these regards Ishmael offers something of an elaboration ofToni Morrison's recent argument that, explicitly or implicitly,some "dark, abiding" presence informs "in compelling andinescapable ways the texture of American literature" and thatthe fabrication of this persona provides powerful, self-reflexive

meditations on the white American self (5,46,17). That Ishmaelsurvives the demise of The Pequod rather than Queequeg (whatwould his version of life with Ahab say?) might suggest thatMelville's instinctive pity in the novel is for the white figuremost like himself; but to the degree that by the "Epilogue"Ishmael is made to incorporate that fabricated dark persona,Melville at least rearranges the "hierarchic difference" emblazoned in "racial difference."6As the reconstituted slave "reader," Ishmael confounds stan6Morrison makes only two specific (but very helpful) commentson Melville in Playing in the Dark: "Consider the ways thatAfricanism in other American writers (Mark Twain, Melville,

Hawthorne) serves as a vehicle for regulating love and the imagination as defenses against the psychic costs of guilt and despair" (5152) and "Melville uses allegorical formations?the white whale, theracially mixed crew, the black-white pairings of male couples, thequesting, questioning white male captain who confronts impenetrable whiteness?to investigate and analyze hierarchic difference.Poe deploys allegorical mechanisms in Pym not to confront andexplore, as Melville does, but to evade and simultaneously registerthe cul de sac, the estrangement, the non-sequitur that is entailedin racial difference" (68-69); I quote from the latter. Somewhat moregenerally, I am not sure that critics ofMoby-Dick have paid sufficientattention to what happens to Ishmael after the Pequod goes down.Do Queequeg's lessons in reciprocity have any felt meaning forIshmael? He continues to live a nomadic life (narrating "The TownHo's Story" in Lima, drinking flip with the crew of the SamuelEnderby, surveying a whale's skeleton in a bower in the Arsacides),but that life has the ring of anti-climax, of recurrence withoutintimacy. Brodtkorb's comments in Ishmael's White World arehelpful: Ishmael's "survival is prior to all ethics; the existentiallysufficient reason for his survival is that what transcends death in timeis art" (138); "Ishmael is amental traveler who accepts with minimalillusions and defenses his human condition in that world of

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The Massachusetts Reviewdard American binarisms of slavery and freedom ("Nothing,"Morrison in fact claims, "highlighted freedom?if it did not infact create it?like slavery" (37)). The very passivity of Ishmael'sescape repudiates romanticized captivities that posit escape, inPrimo Levi's phrase, as "moral obligation" (57). Melville thusquarrels with prevailing mythologies of the whaleman as theseamanly incarnation of American freedom and self-reliance. InJ. N. Reynolds's "Mocha Dick" (an 1839 text that Melvilleprobably knew (Parker, 636-37))7, for example, a stalwartNantucket mate conquers the leviathan to reap fame for himselfand his homeland. Says Reynolds at the end of "Mocha Dick"of the "intrepidity, skill, and fortitude" of the whaleman:

These characteristics are not the growth of forced exertion; theyare incompatible with it. They are the natural result of theardor of a free people; of a spirit of fearless independence,generated by free institutions. (590)

Early in Moby-Dick Melville may to some degree adhere toReynolds's formulations, especially in the novel's apostropheto the "Nantucketer" who "owns" the sea as "Emperors ownempires" and ploughs it "as his own special plantation" (64).By the final position of Ishmael, however, such metaphors ofNew England mastery, curiously evocative of the slave-holdingsouth, give way to Melville's dismantling of Reynolds'sassumptions about "free people" and "fearless independence;"the novel in fact with relentless variety?"the stage managers,the Fates" that mock Ishmael's "unbiased freewill" (7), the"loose fish" that are embryonic "fast fish" (chapter 89), the"wildest winds of heaven and earth" that conspire to cast thesoul "on the treacherous slavish shore" (107)?doubts thephilosophical realizability of Reynolds's freedom, and, inbreaking down the binarism of freedom and slavery, Melvillegrants captivity near normative status. Even Ahab, the book'sostensible "supreme lord and dictator" (122), can be understoodas an epitome of Nietzschean slave morality, the reactive figureexperience to which, like the lone figure floating on a coffin at theend, humanity seems abandoned" (148). See also Egan and Cowan(179-80).7"Mocha Dick" was originally published in the May 1839 editionof The Knickerbocker, New York Monthly Magazine.

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Moby-Dick and American Slave Narrativewhose ressentiment in the face of a hostile external worldgenerates compensatory fictions that say "No to what is 'outside,' what is 'different,'" what is not the self (Nietzsche, 36).8One final parable in Moby-Dick, seldom discussed incriticism of the novel, conflates captivity, textualization, andwhiteness. In a footnote to "The Whiteness of the Whale"chapter, Ishmael describes the first albatross he ever saw, an"inexpressible" and "glorious thing" (190) of "unspotted

whiteness, and vast archangel wings" (190). Like the ships onthe Chesapeake, "robed in purest white," that FrederickDouglass beseeches for deliverance (293), the albatross stands fora transcendent freedom that liberates Ishmael from the "exiledwaters" he sails and from the "warping memories of traditionsand of towns" (190). The bird, however, is the ship's captive,taken "with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on

the sea" (190). The captain frees it, but its flight is contingenton its being made into a "postman," "a lettered, leathern tallyround its neck, with the ship's time and place" (190). LikeIshmael, the albatross escapes alone to tell its news, its "tally,"like Ishmael's story, connected with its deliverance. But thestatus of the albatross's text is problematic. It bears the captain'sdata, not its own, and its tally, "meant for man" (190), reachesinstead the other white fowl of Heaven. Ishmael's ownproprietorship of his text is similarly ambiguous: he cannotdetermine its reception; there is no guarantee whom, if anyone,the text will reach. Whiteness, thus (and its associations withmuteness and misdelivery), finally underlines essential anxietiesof authorship for Ishmael and anticipates Melville's "deadletter" metaphor in "Bartleby" (particularly in the image of thealbatross as postman) and the writerly imprisonment of Pierrein Melville's next novel.

Moby-Dick can be regarded as a palimpsest of Americancaptivity writing generally, quoting and embellishing the

8Ishmael, on the other hand, epitomizes Nietzschean "gaymistrust." There is a variety of critical opinion on Ahab's "servitude." See especially Matthiessen, who regards Ahab as "anembodiment of his author's most profound response to the problemof the free individual will in extremis" (447) and Zoellner, whoargues that "Ahad willed the fundamental destruction of his will,placing himself permanently . . . beyond the possibility of furtherchoice or retraction" (100).

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The Massachusetts Reviewtradition that begins with Mary Rowlandson's 1682 narrativeand includes the slave narratives published in Melville's ownlifetime.9 But, more exactingly, as reconstruction of the American literary canon proceeds, I think it is necessary to considerhow "majority" texts such asMoby-Dick can resemble and revise"minority" texts such as the slave narratives in the interests ofchallenging presumptions about the contingency of the

minority on the majority and of drawing more graceful matricesfor the nation's disparate yet enmeshed stories. One way toconflate Ishmael and the male narrator/hero of the slavenarrative might be to think of them both as belonging to thelarger literary family of the picaro. But a curious synchronicityalso exists between Ishmael and later black singers whose blues,theorizes Houston Baker, become the "robust matrix" of AfroAmerican culture:

Even as they speak of paralyzing absence and ineradicabledesire, their instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement,action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility. Likesignification itself, blues are always nomadically wandering. . . they are ever on the move, ceaselessly summing novelexperience. (7, 8)10

It is of course questionable to what degree a white boy likeIshmael is capable of singing the blues. But his own vocalization

9Breitwieser suggests that Rowlandson comes to anticipateIshmael's "vision of the circulation of pure anomaly and mutation. . . each item of experience being wholly singular and without theredemption of a stable and credible explanatory context" (79).Rowlandson in fact also uses the same line from Job that introduces

Moby-Dick's "Epilogue." Frontier captivity narratives, too, stillenjoyed great popularity in Melville's lifetime. Samuel Drake, forexample, issued reprints of Puritan and Colonial captivity narrativesin the 1820s that continued to appear into the 1860s. The single mostpopular narrative

was his edition of Benjamin Church's 1716 storyof his 1676 pursuit of the Indian Annawon (Slotkin, 444). Melvilleindicates his familiarity with this text in Moby-Dick when heconfuses Church's pursuit of Annawon with Butler's pursuit of theIndian Brant in 1778 after the siege of Fort Stanwix (Rogin, 438).See also Fussell, who catalogues the profusion of western metaphorsinMoby-Dick.10See also Hedin on slave narratives and the picaro.

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Moby-Dick and American Slave Narrativeof "unlimited and unending possibility," nomadic wandering,and "novel experience" suggest a style and ethos perfected bythe bluesman, and, in at least some of its inflections, Moby-Dickyearns toward this robust matrix.

WORKS CITEDAndrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of AfroAmerican Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana and Chicago:U of Illinois P, 1986.Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-AmericanLiterature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago and London: U of

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