“Thou Art Skylarking with Me”: Travesty, Prophecy, and Ethical Mutuality in <i>Moby-Dick</i>

“A Bosom Friend,” Chapter 10 of Moby-Dick, concludes with a literary travesty on the Golden Rule, a norm of obligation to others as to self. If God’s will is that we treat our neighbors as ourselves, and if the narrator, Ishmael, desires his neighbor Queequeg join him in Presbyterian worship, then he must join his new friend’s devotion to his god, Yojo: “ergo, I must turn idolator.” This is after Ishmael has heard Father Mapple’s sermon on Jonah, and after Queequeg has become his bedmate at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford. Queequeg also heard Mapple preach, though left early to return to the inn. So the sermon scene is framed by Queequeg scenes. From one angle, putting Yojo beside the biblical God, or whale hunting with the Golden Rule, can seem to dismiss as absurd these juxtapositions’ terms and questions: of sin, the designs of God, and prophetic calling versus fate, chance, and whoever happens to be one’s neighbor. From another angle, were such terms merely ‘travestied’ as negation, little import would remain in deploying them. This essay considers how, in Chapters 7–12, 16–18, 94, and elsewhere in Moby-Dick, Melville’s juxtaposing parody, satire, travesty and the like with compelling religious and ethical concerns—a rhetoric he occasionally calls “skylarking”—contributes to the novel’s realization of a narrative ethics of mutuality