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Thank you We sneak Moby dick cytology Five dollar word

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Allah shmoop why is melville so insistent on throwing down

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whale fat Uh so we've made it to the first

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of our sea tahl aji chapters that is the chapters

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about whales vitalogy five dollar word people know it Impress

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your friends at cocktail parties actually don't alright so it's

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strange really How much time melville spans on actually considering

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the whale isn't supposed to be a novel of adventure

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not an encyclopedia instead of injuries Why is melville so

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insistent on throwing down whale fat Does he really need

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to show you Well yeah we talked about in the

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preface a little bit he's kind of just trying to

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give us some facts so we know what's coming down

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the pike but there's got to be a little bit

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more for that And you know i think the overarching

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answer here is that as much as moby dick is

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a novel about a hunt for a whale it's also

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a novel about a hunt for knowledge and for other

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abstract ideas So we get information about whale anatomy about

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the representation of wales in art the roles that whales

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have played in history the laws about hunting whales and

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so again we just get this mass of melville knowledge

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thrown at us which makes it feel ah little bit

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more trustworthy You know we have ishmael who's This narrator

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will get into a little later about how he maybe

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isn't the most trustworthy Narrator on and here we get

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some information which you know brings us back and says

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okay we can trust this guy again Come back to

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the biblical imagery moby dick is a metaphor Well moby

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dick's a metaphor for everything One of the things we'll

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be dick might be a metaphor is god we're trying

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to hunt down this whale We're trying to find moby

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dick he's elusive his mysterious uh and this is the

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same way that we kind of try to god you

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know christians think calvinist christian fisherman that came where melville

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came from they're trying to reach god but he's like

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unreachable they can't they can't grasp them So just like

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the bible wants to tell us everything that we can

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possibly know about god moby dick want to tell us

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everything we could know about whales And there are you

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know you go to the bible there's leviticus that's a

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boring old chapter about laws so we can kind of

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compare these cytology chapters two chapters in the bible like

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lucas makes a lot of sense and contextually is we

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think about it in you know the contemporaneous time when

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this was written the notion that whales could be driven

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to extinction by over hunting was probably not something they

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even remotely thought about It's also reasonable toe remember that

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whales were a natural resource the whale oil and all

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the other body parts of wales from the tusks to

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the baleen toe someone was all things that were used

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in normal households and believe or not a typical housewife

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would have known how to cure the whale and manage

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the baleen and they made combs And like all the

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other elemental things that you actually needed for your house

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so emotionally the idea of killing a whale wasn't that

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different from chopping down a tree or like hunting squirrel

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or something your backyard right And and this you know

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we'll talk a little bit about this later as well

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but this brings us to the idea of transcendentalism right

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where you know nature is how we reached god and

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and so like you said it's no different than chopping

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down a tree But if if that tree is a

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metaphor for god which moby dick and whales or metaphor

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for god then it's a little blasphemous that they're kind

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of trying to hunt down in like a harpoon and

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kill this whale which is a metaphor for god So

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again we get this exploration of religion and you know

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again not in one direction or another but but a

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really deep meditation on on what it means what god

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and what nature really means for melville what's the point

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of this city apology chapters Why does melville include them

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For what might moby dick be A metaphor Uh

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