/lit/ - Literature

>>13376600
>Serious question not trying to bait

It's an anti anti-christian novel

>>13376602
Dumb dumb dumb

>>13376603
How so?

No but Melville clearly has problems with the Christian faith.
The whale is clearly God, unknowable all powerful and unable to be contained and rationalized with one set of ideas or philosophy. Ahab screams like an old testemant preacher, obsessed and terrified with God but ultimately aimed against the natural world and with it against God.
Queeqeg despite being a filthy cannibal and pagan understands God better than any other character and grasps the true nature of infinity.

>>13376623
WTF I want to read Moby Dick now.

>>13376600
YUP

>>13377704
Explain why you think so please?

>>13376600
I see it more as an indictment of American Puritanism than Christianity as a whole. The early chapter where the notoriously puritan captain fucks him out of a fair share with the language of the Bible seems like an atrack on how early American ideals were conflating liberalism and religion as equivalent entities.

>>13376623
That's a cool reading, anon.

It's actually about whales

Ecclesiastes

>>13377722
It would take me hours, man. I wish i knew how to articulate it....

For one, just read those Queequeg chapters in the beginning section of the book. Ishmael explicitly states that Christianity is doomed.

Then there's one section where whiteness of the whale means there is nothing in the world that will make sense to you unless you come up with your own colors.

We are pieces of bread from the same loaf or something like that.

All this is different than saying - there is no god but one god. Melville believed in polytheism in my humblest of opinions.

I'd suggest you read the book again. As will I. I am sure of the fact that Melville didn't believe in Christianity.

>>13376623
>the whale is God
No
>>13377809
Interesting take
>>13378030
You're getting there
>>13376600
Was more anti-monotheism

>>13378380
>anti-monotheism
anti-monomania

>>13377809
>I see it more as an indictment of American Puritanism
Hit the nail on the head, Melville was a great admirer and a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, anyone familiar with Hawthorne's fiction should recognize those similar themes found in The Scarlet Letter and Young Goodman Brown that appear to have influenced Melville.

>>13378380
I disagree.
More anti-monodogmatic

>>13376600
Melville was a polytheist. A polyreligionist. Moby Dick is the personification of the ocean. The ocean is liquid, amorphous, deep, dark, chaos. Contrary to the land which is solid, concrete, ordered.

Like light, like whiteness, which is the blending of all colors yet also colorless, ultimate reality is unknowable. Like light, like a rainbow, each color is a perspective because in reality nothing has color, all is white it's just interpretation of the spectra. Like a rainbow which is a collection of colors without becoming white, Melville, Ishmael, collect religions. Religions are not all saying the same thing, to say so is whiteness, but neither is any wholly correct, to say so is taking only one color for the whole spectrum. Ahab wants to kill the whale, make the ocean concrete, know the unknowable. He's anti-Christian only when Christians insist on the rightness of their beliefs to all others. In certain moods, he is devoutly Christians. In others, pagan.

>>13378697
Why do you say polytheist.
He was absolutely Omnist but he still prayed to a monotheistic God

>>13376600
it was literally the book of Jonah

>>13378733
Explain?

>>13376623
Based interpretation

>>13378778
I mean, the father in the chapel explains Jonah in some depth as foreshadowing at the start

>>13378789
Because Jonah was consumed by the whale as Captain Ahab was consumed by the idea of Moby Dick, symbolic of God.

>>13378865
the whale was sent by God
The whale was an agent of God
Not God

>>13379788
Incorrect

So in short

Ahab=Michael
Whale=Lucifer?

>>13380983
whaliam

>>13376623
The Whale is a whale.

>>13376623
>>13378865
>>13379788
>>13380983
The whale is a fish

>>13381038

Whale is also God's favourite animal

>>13376600
no, just pro-life

>>13376623
boring
>>13378697
closer to the truth