ShmoopTube

00:00

Thank you We sneak Moby dick religion allow shmoop it's

00:12

not long before melville begins mashing together all of this

00:15

religion with seafaring going out to sea and hunting for

00:18

whales Let's take a look in some of these early

00:20

chapters and see how these two topics are consistently combined

00:24

talked to us about how religion shows up in moby

00:27

dick and expand on ishmael and the whole biblical structure

00:31

that but comes with all this who is god and

00:33

how does it all play out Yeah well we'll see

00:35

throughout the course that religion is in every line of

00:38

this book you can't turn a page without getting some

00:41

sort of religious imagery Why is that Melville was born

00:46

and raised in a pretty strict calvinist christian home Three

00:51

calvinists were all about predestination so basically they thought that

00:55

when you were born it was already everything that was

00:58

going to happen to you was already set in stone

01:01

God had already decided every single thing that would happen

01:04

to you So basically you were the control of fate

01:06

although in this case fate is god and melville's kind

01:11

of writing this book as not necessarily a reaction against

01:15

that but as an exploration of it And so while

01:19

you're reading you'll kind of see these notions of you

01:21

know fate is controlling everything that's happening or god is

01:25

controlling everything's happening and also no man has free will

01:29

and and this kind of concept of fate versus free

01:32

will is one of the most important things in the

01:34

book and you want to keep your eye out for

01:36

it but what he is criticizing So while melville isn't

01:40

criticizing calvinist theology or or the opposite he he's he's

01:45

criticizing extremism so anyone who you know won't accept one

01:50

or the other or we'll kill for their religion or

01:53

things like that That's what he's really criticizing and everything

01:56

else is more pacific exploration of religion But as you

02:00

mentioned the biblical imagery ends up being tied really closely

02:04

to the nautical imagery of the sea faring imagery So

02:08

we get the first two ends that they they all

02:11

come across before they set out to sea are called

02:13

the crossed harpoons and the sword fish in so cross

02:19

and fish thes heir to biblical images that are turned

02:23

into nautical seafaring images on dh this this happens throughout

02:28

the entire book a lot of the characters have biblical

02:31

names were saw Ishmael we have captain ahab elijah I

02:36

want the boat's named jeroboam like there's just tons of

02:39

biblical names that come up there's also a lot of

02:42

footnotes in this book So as you're reading pay attention

02:45

to those footnotes Thiss isn't one of those things where

02:47

you're going to like want toe you know skim over

02:49

it The footnotes will help you kind of figure out

02:51

what the references are the big limb injuries always tied

02:55

to see So the church is a boat the preacher

03:00

is a captain The pulpit is the proud and so

03:04

on and so forth so kind everywhere you go whenever

03:06

you see bible you're going to want to think sea

03:09

and whenever you think see you're going to wantto think

03:11

bible what rolled his religion play in the novel Why

03:15

is the theme of fate versus free will So important 00:03:25.408 --> [endTime] And we're not talking about that killer whale

Full Transcript