Unreliable Narrator

Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville

Moby-Dick: Unreliable Narrator 1 key example

Unreliable Narrator
Explanation and Analysis—Ishmael as Narrator :

Ishmael, a storyteller who constantly emphasizes the limits of his own knowledge and that of writing, proves himself to be an unreliable narrator, and one who doesn’t hide it. Indeed, Ishmael repeatedly hints that he cannot give a full and complete picture of the tales he is narrating. His discussion of the impossibility of representing the whale in art—a discussion that highlights the imperfections of his own attempt to do so through writing—is one example that emphasizes this self-awareness. When he attempts his classification of the whales, he is quick to acknowledge that he can “promise nothing complete” because “any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.” In other words, a full and faithful tale would be an impossible feat.