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I'm not sure how helpful this will be, but I went to talk to one of my linguistics professors after class today about the tree-structure for this sentence, since it's a much more complicated one than I've ever drawn (in beginning syntax, all we covered were declarative statements and questions, which are a variation of declarative statements anyway).

This is not a full tree, because a full tree version involves a lot more (above the TP - Tense Phrase) which I didn't learn, and which would probably take several classes to explain in and of itself anyway. But there's more in the tree that would categorize this sentence as an "operational" one (a command sentence).

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e387/sheyrenatreves/treeofcallmeishmael.jpg

If you're interested, this is the structure tree that I drew (a more basic version). Not sure what the HTML code is to make this show up as a picture, but, there's the link if you want to look?

The DP is a determiner phrase (because, linguistically speaking, a noun phrase isn't necessarily just a noun phrase - it could have a determiner "the", "a", etc, attached, so this allows for it). I abbreviated the structures of the rest of them, but in the DP I drew the full structure so you can see it. The little vP is a different kind of verb phrase, not one I'd learned before, but apparently it's used when both a direct and an indirect object are present, to show that the verb (which, in the underlying grammatical structure, appears between the two nouns), in the physical pronunciation of the sentence, moves up before them.

As for the "you", as we mentioned in class, it's the understood subject of the sentence, though it's not actually pronounced (hence the parenthesis). In most English sentences, the subject's underlying property is contained in the same VP (or, vP in this case) as the verb, but since it's the subject, it's moved up to a place of focus in the TP (also, there is no tense indication under T here since it's a command, but I suppose you could write (present) there or something). That doesn't mean the subject would be pronounced twice (or in this case, at all), I just drew the structure here twice so you could see what a full DP section looks like.

And I apologize if this is horribly confusing, it would take probably a few classes to explain it in full (it took us a year to even get to this stage in my syntax class, and already modern syntax theory is saying parts of what we learned are wrong), and like I said, there's a lot that comes before this that I don't haven't learned about yet at all.

Also, I'm not really sure, like I said, how much use this will be in examining Moby Dick, or Bakhtin's theory of speech genres, since these structures deal with the physical grammar of sentences, not so much the underlying meaning (that would be a semantics course).

But, I was asked about it, so, I did my best to get an answer...