Moby Dick (whale) (larger than any officially recorded sperm whale) and that Moby Dick is possibly the largest sperm whale that ever lived. Ahab tells the crew that the White Whale can be told because it has an unusual spout, a deformed jaw, three punctures in his right fluke and several harpoons embedded in his side from unsuccessful hunts. Yet Ishmael insists that what invested the whale with “natural terror” was that “unexampled, intelligent malignity” which he had shown in his assaults. When he fled before “exalting pursuers,” giving every symptom of alarm, he would suddenly turn round and stave their boats to
On Top of the Whale any such encounter is inevitably a game in which the 'objects' of ethnographic inquire are dissimulating themselves and this dissimulation is inevitably subject to further distortions in its interpretations". Several themes that come forth in "On Top of the Whale" include Life, Survival, Love, Reality, Illusion, Marxism and Civilization. It could be treated as a parodic version of a problematic cross-cultural "first contact", in colonial settings. Its emphasis is on the anthropologists attempt to understand native culture and unintentionally harming it as a result. On Top of the Whale On Top of the Whale () is a 1982 Dutch surreal