Quote 1
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge. (41.1)
It’s interesting that Ishmael specifically tells us that he’s totally down with Ahab’s crazy revenge quest. It’s also interesting that he only tells us this after the chapter in which the crew swears an oath; did he forget to mention he was there while he was telling the story, or what?
Ishmael’s role as narrator and his situation as a character in the novel seem to be coming into conflict, especially because the reader probably doesn’t support Ahab as much as Ishmael claims to do. Thus, revenge divides Ishmael from the reader. From this point forward, the narrator will seem less and less like Ishmael and more and more like Melville.
Quote 2
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, – literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. (94.4)
For Ishmael, it’s possible to let the revenge quest fade away as he’s caught up in the almost sacred act of squeezing globules of solidified sperm oil. We’re not sure we could have an epiphany up to our elbows in whale grease, but hey, each to his own. Ahab, unfortunately, can’t seem to access this experience of release and purification; no comfort is possible for him. It makes us wonder what he’d do if he actually did achieve his revenge. Would he be able to relax then, or what?
Quote 3
[L]ulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. (35.10)
In this mystical scene, Ishmael feels himself dissolving into the natural world, losing track of the boundary between the self and the world in a very "Zen" way. The key word here, which Melville uses in the passage, is "Pantheistic." Pantheism is the belief that God and the world are the same thing. God’s not just in the world, but absolutely equivalent to it, and everything that exists is divine.
This means that the individual believer, who is also a part of the world, is a divine part of God, as well. It’s interesting to contrast the ways Ishmael feels himself to be united to all of creation and to God at this transcendent moment. It reminds us of the central tenets of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism in the mid-nineteenth century—especially of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It also reminds us how different Ishmael is from Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask.