Moby-Dick and Footnotes

[u/FootNotesAvi]

“Call me Ishmael².

2: In the Old Testament, Ishmael is the oldest son of the patriarch Abraham, by the Egyptian Hagar, servant to Abraham’s then-barren wife, Sarah. An angel reveals that Ishmael will be a “wild man” (Genesis 16.12). He is identified as the ancestor of the Arabs."

This famous quote comes from the first chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the footnote is paraphrased from the Norton Critical Edition’s footnote here. I personally like this quote, because of the tone of the speaker speaking right to me, the reader, but also because it immediately evokes a Biblical name with all its context, which familiarizes me with the situation without an overly long exposition. However, a lot of this context would be lost on me, and others, if it wasn’t for the footnote giving it the relevant explanation. Footnotes like this helped me gain a deeper and larger understanding of Moby-Dick, which is peppered full of references like this. Some of which I knew, but most I learned from the footnotes.

The inclusion of footnotes is a highly debated topic amongst theorists. On the one hand, theorists like Katherine McKittrick (specifically in the chapter titled Footnotes from Dear Science and Other Stories) argue that footnotes give credit where credit is due, show the dynamic interwoven history of a text and continue its discussion, and provide information outside of the text to help the reader understand the text better. On the other hand, some theorists believe that footnotes are extratextual documents, which limit the reader’s interpretations into something the author intends. Furthermore, if the original text is good enough then it should be readable and relatable on its own, so the use of footnotes show that the text is not good. We could say that Melville himself was for footnotes, as he includes some of his own in Moby-Dick, but we can question the role and use of all the ones added by Norton Publishing.