흰색의 공포: 이쉬마엘의 모호한 반인종주의와 『모비딕』의 동시대성

Abstract

By focusing on how Herman Melville narrativizes Ishmael’s sense of the veiled secrets of Moby Dick‘s whiteness, this essay sheds new light on the significance of his ambiguous antiracism. Unlike existing readings of Ishmael as an anti-racist, I argue, he is depicted as a racist in the scene of his encounter with Queequeg, where his implicit racism is predicated on the contemporary notion of white superiority. Then, in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” Ishmael delves into the profound significance of the peculiar whiteness of Moby Dick, only to acknowledge its profound inscrutablity. However the chapter’s theme is not inscrutability but hermeneutic indecisiveness that brings about all vain efforts to comprehend the true meaning of whiteness but gradually leads Ishmael to antiracism. However, Ishmael, though realizing the ideology of white color and people, keeps his antiracism ambiguous, which is how he relates himself to his contemporary American racist history. It is such paradoxical contemporariness that Meville intends to represent by means of Ishmael’s ambiguous antiracism in “The Whiteness of the Whale.”