ABSTRACT
“Call me Ishmael,” we are told. But that name is equivocally stated, despite the abruptly imperative form of its declaration. The narrator precisely does not say that his name is Ishmael; or even that he is called Ishmael as a kind of nickname. “Call me Ishmael,” he says, and immediately the diction of affable informality followed by the shock of the biblical name which is both formal and highly unlikely puts us in the presence of someone who for reasons of his own would rather not say who he really is.
