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Moby-Dick - Cetology 525 Views
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Description:
Moby-Dick is full of adventures, lessons, and unbelievably boring chapters...sounds kind of like life. Whoa. Trippy.
Transcript
- 00:00
Thank you We sneak Moby dick cytology Five dollar word
- 00:11
Allah shmoop why is melville so insistent on throwing down
- 00:17
whale fat Uh so we've made it to the first
- 00:20
of our sea tahl aji chapters that is the chapters
- 00:23
about whales vitalogy five dollar word people know it Impress
Full Transcript
- 00:27
your friends at cocktail parties actually don't alright so it's
- 00:30
strange really How much time melville spans on actually considering
- 00:33
the whale isn't supposed to be a novel of adventure
- 00:36
not an encyclopedia instead of injuries Why is melville so
- 00:40
insistent on throwing down whale fat Does he really need
- 00:43
to show you Well yeah we talked about in the
- 00:46
preface a little bit he's kind of just trying to
- 00:49
give us some facts so we know what's coming down
- 00:51
the pike but there's got to be a little bit
- 00:53
more for that And you know i think the overarching
- 00:56
answer here is that as much as moby dick is
- 00:59
a novel about a hunt for a whale it's also
- 01:01
a novel about a hunt for knowledge and for other
- 01:04
abstract ideas So we get information about whale anatomy about
- 01:10
the representation of wales in art the roles that whales
- 01:14
have played in history the laws about hunting whales and
- 01:18
so again we just get this mass of melville knowledge
- 01:21
thrown at us which makes it feel ah little bit
- 01:25
more trustworthy You know we have ishmael who's This narrator
- 01:29
will get into a little later about how he maybe
- 01:31
isn't the most trustworthy Narrator on and here we get
- 01:33
some information which you know brings us back and says
- 01:35
okay we can trust this guy again Come back to
- 01:39
the biblical imagery moby dick is a metaphor Well moby
- 01:43
dick's a metaphor for everything One of the things we'll
- 01:45
be dick might be a metaphor is god we're trying
- 01:48
to hunt down this whale We're trying to find moby
- 01:51
dick he's elusive his mysterious uh and this is the
- 01:57
same way that we kind of try to god you
- 02:01
know christians think calvinist christian fisherman that came where melville
- 02:05
came from they're trying to reach god but he's like
- 02:07
unreachable they can't they can't grasp them So just like
- 02:12
the bible wants to tell us everything that we can
- 02:15
possibly know about god moby dick want to tell us
- 02:18
everything we could know about whales And there are you
- 02:21
know you go to the bible there's leviticus that's a
- 02:24
boring old chapter about laws so we can kind of
- 02:26
compare these cytology chapters two chapters in the bible like
- 02:30
lucas makes a lot of sense and contextually is we
- 02:33
think about it in you know the contemporaneous time when
- 02:37
this was written the notion that whales could be driven
- 02:41
to extinction by over hunting was probably not something they
- 02:45
even remotely thought about It's also reasonable toe remember that
- 02:50
whales were a natural resource the whale oil and all
- 02:55
the other body parts of wales from the tusks to
- 02:58
the baleen toe someone was all things that were used
- 03:01
in normal households and believe or not a typical housewife
- 03:05
would have known how to cure the whale and manage
- 03:07
the baleen and they made combs And like all the
- 03:10
other elemental things that you actually needed for your house
- 03:13
so emotionally the idea of killing a whale wasn't that
- 03:15
different from chopping down a tree or like hunting squirrel
- 03:18
or something your backyard right And and this you know
- 03:21
we'll talk a little bit about this later as well
- 03:23
but this brings us to the idea of transcendentalism right
- 03:25
where you know nature is how we reached god and
- 03:29
and so like you said it's no different than chopping
- 03:30
down a tree But if if that tree is a
- 03:34
metaphor for god which moby dick and whales or metaphor
- 03:37
for god then it's a little blasphemous that they're kind
- 03:39
of trying to hunt down in like a harpoon and
- 03:42
kill this whale which is a metaphor for god So
- 03:45
again we get this exploration of religion and you know
- 03:47
again not in one direction or another but but a
- 03:51
really deep meditation on on what it means what god
- 03:54
and what nature really means for melville what's the point
- 03:58
of this city apology chapters Why does melville include them
- 04:03
For what might moby dick be A metaphor Uh
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