Sentence:  At the beginning of his narrative, Ishmael mentions <WSD>Narcissus</WSD>, the legendary character who plunged into the water and was drowned in the attempt to grasp his own essence (p. 14). <WSD>Narcissus</WSD> was unwilling to understand the relationship between himself and “the ungraspable phantom of life” in gradualistic terms and sought to bring that relationship to immediate closure, thus annihilating himself. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A youth who spurned the love of Echo and fell in love with his own reflection in a pool: in some versions of the myth, he drowned trying to reach it, while in others he sat fixated until a god took pity and transformed him into a flower.