Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

138starts with “call me Ishmael”. This injunction echoes the biblical reference. The biblicalreferences in the narrative frame the reader’s splitting and doubling in attempting to comprehendthe excess of meaning and the intricacy of referents. Recognizing the biblical Ishmael (thedisinherited and abandoned son, the son who was spared, the ancestor of the Arab peoples)frames our initial reading of Ishmael the character in Moby-Dick and moves the narrative towardthe Greek Narcissus. Ishmael’s dual presence as both a character and a narrator explains hispolyvalence and the dialogic nature of the narrative. As the title of the chapter “Loomings”suggests, Ishmael is coming into view indistinctly and threateningly.Let us now consider the issue of duplication in the narrative. In Moby-Dick there are manyspare boats, lines, and harpoons. In “The Carpenter,” for example, the narrator raises a veryphilosophical point: “Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take highabstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point,take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, bothcontemporary and hereditary” (441). However, nothing is unnecessary in Moby-Dick; everythingserves for something. All the copies and duplicates we see in the novel form doubles and redoubles.What we have here is the doubling of significance: material objects on the ship have alsoa symbolic significance, which unfolds under the sign of this Biblical Ishmael, and of thetemporal difference between a disaster that looms and the present moment of narration.The double, like any other concept, is governed by two seemingly opposed poles:harmony (reflection) and disjunction (reversal of reflection). I want to argue that the double is notonly opened by the split between the self and the other, but also, and more importantly, betweenthe “I” and the “me”. We find these two concepts in all discourses. The common concept of