Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is an example of the well-known idea that art imitates life; Melville based Moby Dick from his own whaling adventures in the late 1830’s. Moby Dick is narrated by a character named Ishmael, a man who goes to sea in order to escape the mundane life of landsmen. Throughout the first chapter of Moby Dick, Ishmael proclaims that he goes to sea as nothing more than a simple sailor; however, readers know that Ishmael is anything but a simple man, nonetheless a simple sailor, for there are several pieces of evidence throughout chapter one that prove Ishmael is not simple by any means. Ishmael’s vocabulary is clearly that of an educated man, yet Ishmael’s vocabulary is not the only thing which proves that he is not a simple
