A Pilgrim’s Digression

I am sure this has already been bandied about the blogosphere. Still, it’s worth pointing out that the cryptic “A Ishmael” and “Ismael Ax” referred to on the package the Tech murderer mailed to NBC, and which he had tatooed on his arm, is probably a reference to the character of Ishmael from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

In the Bible, the name Ishmael means “God will hear,” and he is described as being quite wicked. Genesis 16: “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”

Of course, in Moby Dick, he is considerable more sympathetic, though also something of an outcast from society. He says in the opening that he can only stand civilized society for so long before he needs to take to the sea for his sanity. At the same time, before setting sail, when he is put up in a room–the same bed, even–with the naked and physically imposing polynesian harpooner, Queequeg, Ishmael is troubled by this “noble savage” as well. People in general, of any sort, seem to make Ishmael uncomfortable.

Ishmael is also the only survivor from the destruction of the Pequod by the white whale, floating away on a coffin, of all things. In the end of the novel, he is as outcast and alone as at the beginning, “an orphan” as Melville describes him.

“And only I am escaped alone to tell thee,” Melville writes, quoting Job.

And in a way, although Cho did not escape alive to tell the tale, he did leave a sort of epilogue to the tragedy in the form of the package he mailed to NBC. I am pretty sure, then, that Ishmael is a sort of nom de plume (or nom de guerre as the case may be) for Cho. “A. Ishmael” seems pretty obviously so, since it is the name on the package he mailed. Cho views himself as quite literally a Ishmael, an outcast son, a “wild donkey” of a man. The only thing I don’t understand is the “Ishmael Ax” supposedly tatooed on his arm. What does the Ax mean?