While everyone else perishes, what is it about Ishmael that deems him worthy of survival (Other than his being a narrator)?Moby Dick by Herman...

As the narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael
is the voice of his author Herman Melville who contemplates the inscrutableness of the
universe. Melville, who once said that the sea was his teacher, employs the sea as
teacher of Ishamel.

1.  Ishamel represents
man's isolation.

Ishmael, like his Biblical
name is a rootless individual, and as a loner, he can be more objective than other men. 
Even though he feels that Queequeq is his "own inseparable twin brother" as he holds the
monkey-rope in Chapter 49, he realizes that he only has "the management of one end of
it."  When his friend Queequeq decides to have his coffin made and to die, Ishmael
understands nothing of the pagan's soul or heart.  Even though he squeezes the sperm
from the whales with the others and shake hands warmly with them, Ishmael does not know
the inner workings of their hearts, either. Thus, Ishmael represents the aloneness of
man and is picked up by the Rachel

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that in her retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan.
(Epilogue)

2. 
Ishmael expresses Herman Melville's perception of the inexplicability of
the universe

Try as hard as he can to
analyze and explicate the workings and properties of the whale, Ishmael does not
understand the creature who wears "a pasteboard mask" as Ahab describes this
inscrutability of nature.  On many occasions, Ishmael expresses a feeling about the
Fates as he senses the unsympathetic and irresistible force of Nature. Therefore, his
character represents the inexplicability of the universe as he senses the interplay of
fate and chance. In Chapter96, for instance, Ishmael
narrates,

So
seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of
the fireship on the sea.  wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the
better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.  the continual sight of
the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat
that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at the midnight
helm.

Besides being the
narator who is the most objective of characters and who has an eagerness to learn,
Ishmael best represents the isolation of man.  In addition, in his sometimes ineffective
attempts to explain what happens throughout the novel, Ishmael conveys to the reader the
interplay of fate and chance.