wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales
ngl I think I might find that interesting…
Comment on Calling all Dickheads!
jqubed@lemmy.world 14 hours agoIt’s one of the very small number of books to defeat me. The narrative part was okay but every other chapter was full of wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales and their lives and I just couldn’t take it.
tomiant@piefed.social 14 hours ago
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
If you consider the fact it was written in 1850 it is surprisingly accurate, like it was talking about whales eating giant squids a century before the scientific community accepted that.
Also the whale descriptions are the point, the book is about the enlightenment drive to understand and therefore master nature with Moby dick standing in as a refutation of that idea, being unconquerable no matter how much knowledge you have. Without the descriptions you could write off Ishmael and the crew as a bunch of idiots who just didn’t have the know how to take down Moby dick.