The Fisherman

“Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe. Though it’s what my ma named me, I’ve never liked Abraham. It’s a name that sounds so full of itself, so Biblical, so…I believe patriarchal is the word I’m after.”

The first sentence of The Fisherman is an allusion to the famous opening of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, whose first-person narrator introduces himself with the iconic words, “Call me Ishmael.” Indeed, Langan’s haunted narrator bears strong, deliberate similarities to the protagonist of Moby-Dick, and Melville’s dark, brooding novel was the primary model for The Fisherman’s story of obsession. However, Langan’s opening lines strike a lighter note of folksy irreverence, hinting that his fish tale should not be taken as seriously as Melville’s. Even so, Abe’s aversion to the title of “patriarch” also foreshadows the novel’s last lines, which ironically reveal that he has spawned a pair of monstrous “children” by the resurrected “Marie,” his deceased wife.

“With each year that passed, I came to ask myself if Marie might not have gone out of this world so much as gone more deeply into it. From being wrapped up in earth, maybe she’d made her way out into it, into the soil, the water, until she was part of things. Maybe she’d found a way to lead me back to her.”

Abe, who lost his young wife to cancer, wonders if his growing fascination with fishing could be a sign of Marie reaching out to him from beyond the grave. If so, Marie mirrors the angel who saved the biblical Ishmael (son of Abraham) by leading him to water: another Melvillian allusion. The passage also anticipates the book’s last scene, which suggests that Marie has again helped to rescue Abe—this time, from Dan’s demonic doppelgänger.