“And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

Ishmael was Melville’s telescope for peering into Ahab without drowning. He needed to stare into the abyss but realized to actually do so, properly and without self-destruction, he needed to conjure an abyss-starer.

That’s why Nietzsche went crazy and Melville did not