ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos

Moby-Dick - Cetology 525 Views


Share It!


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

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

Up Next

The Importance of Being Earnest Summary
123037 Views

They say that honesty is the best policy, but Jack lies about his identity and still gets the girl. Does that mean we should all lie to get what we...

Related Videos

The Giver Summary
105891 Views

Ever wish you could remember everything that you ever studied? How about everything that everyone has ever studied? Yeah, pretty sure our brains ju...

Invisible Man (Ellison)
1818 Views

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an American classic. Hope you're not expecting any exciting shower scenes though. It's not that kind of book.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
1255 Views

Do not go gentle into that good night. In fact, if it's past your curfew, don't go at all into that good night. You just stay in your good bed and...

Quotes: A fool's paradise
293 Views

Find out the meaning behind "a fool's paradise."