Editing Moby-Dick (section)

=== Point of view ===
Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with the use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings.<ref name="Bezanson 1953, 644">Bezanson (1953), 644</ref> Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself? I must, else all these chapters might be naught."<ref>Quoted in Bezanson (1953), 645</ref> Scholar John Bryant calls him the novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice".<ref>Bryant (1998), 67–8</ref> [[Walter Bezanson]] first distinguishes Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls "forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown older".<ref name="Bezanson 1953, 644"/> A second distinction is between either or both Ishmaels with the author Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael".<ref>Bezanson (1953), 647</ref>