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Call Me Fedallah: Reading a Proleptic Narrative in Moby-Dick

Fedallah's role in Moby-Dick may be considered a "proleptic narrative" sup- pressed not only in Ishmael's story of survival but also in the scholarship on Melville's novel. Fedallah's role is often perceived to be categorically limited as a self-sacrifi cial prophet of doom piloting Ahab's soul, and the Pequod's body, to damnation. Although Fedallah has been dehumanized in the long aftermath of the self-perpetuating narrative voice "Call me Ishmael" and marginalized through decades of scholarly silence, we can discern his textual presence through an anal- ysis that retraces the few steps he takes and listens to the few words he articulates. Opening with an emancipating account of Fedallah's role in the chapter "Leg and Arm," followed by an equally subversive reading of "The Whale Watch," a chap- ter that contains the only fully externalized case of the character engaging in a verbal exchange, I argue that the Parsee is not so much a baffl ing Mephistopheles as a lone drifter with an untold story, summed up in his life-affi rming cry to Ahab, "Take another pledge, old man."