What's the Cultural Meaning of the Slide and Catch in Baseball?

Sports often reflect interesting aspects of a culture. For example, the 24-second shot clock in basketball reflects the fast-paced lifestyle of contemporary Americans. So what about the slide in baseball? How does it resonate with American culture?

I think sliding reflects American ambivalence about social authority. Baseball players dress up in fine clothes (how many other sports require a belt?), as if they're going to church or court--and then they throw themselves in the dirt. Respect and disdain for authority are in tension with each other in baseball and American society. Respect the rules, but kill the ump. Get dressed up, but slide in the dirt. Sliding is controlled social rebellion.

 

We should remember that sliding didn't have to become part of baseball. For roughly the first hundred years of baseball's existence, there was no such thing as sliding. The slide was a novelty when first introduced in the mid-1800s and many people opposed it, arguing that players should be allowed to overrun every base rather than sliding. This is how the crowd reacted to one of the first recorded slides, during an 1859 game in Portland, Maine: "the feat fairly astonished the natives, who at first roared with laughter, but Chandler scored the run, and they then woke up to the fact that a large, new and valuable 'wrinkle' had been handed out to them" (quoted in Peter Morris's excellent book, A Game of Inches: The Stories That Shaped Baseball, p. 265).

This early phase in baseball history reminds us that sliding didn't become popular for purely practical reasons. There were other ways to reach the bases, just as basketball could still be played without a shot clock, as it was in its early years. Sliding has become such a fixture in baseball because it resonates with American ambivalence about social authority.



And what about the catch?

The catch seems to simulate a key aspect of human history: sharing. The writer-director of Field of Dreams, Phil Alden Robinson, touched on this when he described a catch this way (in the DVD bonus materials and a 2009 SI article):

"I give to you. I receive from you. It's a lovely experience with nonverbal communication, the sharing of something very sweet."

Of course, the best example of this sweet sharing is the father-son catch at the end of the film ("Dad, you wanna' have a catch?").




Such sharing is not only deeply emotional--it's the very reason homo sapiens are here today. Without reciprocal gift-giving and sharing of information, homo sapiens never would have made it. One of my professors in grad school used to say, "Early hominids were dumb, friendly, and good to eat. How in the world did they ever survive?" I'm finally ready with a short answer: Sharing.


I usually resist "We're Hunter-Gatherer" explanations for contemporary cultural patterns, since they often lead to dangerous claims about unchanging "human nature," but I'm making an exception in this case because the parallels are too overwhelming.

What else? Do the slide and the catch have other resonances with that nebulous, ever-changing thing we call American culture?



Related Posts about Baseball:
What would George Carlin say about baseball vs. basketball?

All my posts about baseball and Field of Dreams
 
10-Second Video of a Little League Player Stealing 2nd Base While the Pitcher's Not Looking:

Interpreting Broderick's Poem in "The Freshman"

I can't resist analyzing the poem that Matthew Broderick recites to Marlon Brando in The Freshman.

Since The Freshman is about an elaborate con-game that plays off The Godfather, Broderick's poem is heavily symbolic and layered—a dream within a dream within a dream. So I have to ask: What does this poem mean?

In the scene in question, Don Sabatini (Brando) is visiting Clark Kellogg (Broderick) in his dorm room at NYU. After Clark tells him that his father was a poet and died when Clark was young, Sabatini asks Clark to recite one of his father's poems. This is the poem that Clark recites from memory:

A Doorway on Boylston Street

There's a certain doorway on Boylston Street
that I passed by on foot, suited and shod,
one of many each Tuesday,
toward lunch with a certain woman,
regarded each Tuesday by the perfect turning gaze of a white Persian,
regarding me, love-bound and sped by desire,
and returning to the certainty of his fur.

Sabatini not only guesses correctly that the poem was about "a cat in the doorway," but he repeats and savors the last line about "the certainty of his fur," and he admires Clark for remembering his father's poetry. It's one of the most touching father-son scenes ever filmed.

Here's my specific question: What does the cat in this poem stand for? I see at least a couple possible interpretations.

The Cat = Brando
The cat in the poem is regal, self-assured, and a careful observer of human social interactions—just like Don Sabatini in The Freshman and Don Corleone in The Godfather. In fact, when Clark gets to the part in the poem about being "regarded" by the cat's "turning gaze," the camera zooms in on Don Sabatini and shows his eyes focusing intensely on Clark and his head titling to the side, mirroring the cat in the poem.

Given that both Clark and his father took this poem about a cat into their hearts, and given that the cat stands symbolically for Sabatini, the poem creates a major turning point in the film: it gives Clark permission to accept Sabatini as a second father, a choice that even his own father would have approved of. The final obstacle to the father-son union of Sabatini and Clark has been removed, clinching the core emotional dimension of the con game. Sabatini pulls Clark even closer to him just when he was about to leave Sabatini, his family, and his business.

But there is at least one other way to interpret the cat.

The Cat = the Cat in The Godfather, as well as Clark and the Komodo Dragon.
It's hard to think of Brando without thinking of the iconic image of him holding a cat in the first scene of The Godfather:

This image of Don Corleone and the cat appears on posters and movie boxes of The Godfather.

Even while he's besieged with requests on his daughter's wedding day, Don Corleone is so masterful and nurturing that he keeps this cat purring, like his clients. It's fair to assume that the cat in Clark's father's poem plays off this famous image, but the difference is that the Don's regal, masterful nature is symbolized in The Godfather by the way he toyed with a cat, not by his identification with the cat itself.

But maybe that difference doesn't matter, and not just because distinctions between subject and object often blur in poetry. The cat in the father's poem, the cat in The Godfather, and the komodo dragon at the center of The Freshman have something in common: they're all animals manipulated by the Don.  The komodo dragon is what first lures Clark into Sabatini's orbit, but the cat in the poem closes the deal, as I said earlier.

Clark, too, like the komodo dragon and the cat in The Godfather, is being played with by the Don in the course of a pursuit that mixes love, family, and profit. Completing the father-son union, the cat could be both Broderick and Brando at the same time, in which case my two interpretations wouldn't be at odds.

These twin interpretations seem to work, but whenever I get this involved in analyzing a Hollywood film, I check myself by asking whether I'm turning into Professor Fleeber, the over-the-top Film Studies Professor in The Freshman who went so far as to compare Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and the Lake Tahoe scene from The Godfather, II. I take Professor Fleeber as a funny cautionary tale, a reminder not to get too carried away with my interpretations, which is a danger in this business.

Professor Fleeber, unable to resist mouthing the dialogue to himself while his students watch The Godfather, II.

Unlike Fleeber but like most of the professors I know, I try not to be mean to my students, and rather than regurgitation, I always insist that my students develop original interpretations in their papers. But if somebody wants to see some of my film interpretations (including this one) as over-the-top in a Fleeberian way, that's fine. At least Fleeber understands that film analysis can be social and emotional at the same time. And if Fleeber goes a bit too far with some of his interpretations, he's erring on the right side. As I've said before, I'd rather risk over-stating the case than stating the obvious. If I'm going to live in a dream within a dream within a dream, I'm glad it's this one.

Further Reading:
My post about two songs ("I Wanna Be Around" and "Mona Lisa") in The Freshman

All my posts about The Godfather

Certainly Andrew Bergman, the screenwriter who created The Freshman and Professor Fleeber, understood the value of socially-informed film criticism. Bergman wrote a PhD dissertation in American history about how Hollywood films reflected social tensions during the Depression, later published as We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (1992). Bergman's book was well-received by scholars and published by NYU Press, Fleeber's old haunt.

Football and Basketball as American Rituals

How do football and basketball reflect American culture? I think it's fair to assume there's a connection. Otherwise, the highlight of the American sports year would be something like Super Shot-Put Sunday (SSS) or the Big Badminton Bowl (BBB). Instead, Americans gravitate toward football and basketball. Why?

(Note: I originally posted this mini-essay on AnthropologyWorks.com).

Football action. Photo credit: JSmith, Creative Commons, Flickr

Football vs. Basketball

Here are a few salient differences between football and basketball, highlighted to throw their essential qualities into relief.

In football, players dress in Superhero outfits.
In basketball, players dress in bathing suits.

In football, it’s so cold you see steam coming out of the players, as if they’re scaling Mt. Everest.
In basketball, it’s so hot you see sweat pouring off players, as if they’re mowing the lawn.

But the ultimate difference lies in spatial orientation.

Football is all about lines: Lining up on lines, measuring lines, crossing lines. The central objective of the game, in fact, is to cross a line: the goal line.

Basketball, on the other hand, is all about circles: putting a rubber circle inside a slightly larger, metal circle (the ball and the hoop). Instead of yard lines, the basketball court is divided up into circles: the center circle (which contains a circle within a circle), the 3-point line (which is a semi-circle), and the foul circle at the top of the key. Not to mention all the players running around in circles, trying to get open for a pass. Lines vs. circles—that’s the key difference.

Blazers Court. Photo credit: Tom Langston, Creative Commons, Flickr

Empty Redskins Field; Photo credit: squidpants, Creative Commons, Flickr

How, though, do these micro aspects of football and basketball reflect American culture? (Warning: I’d rather risk overstating the case than stating the obvious, and I would never say there’s only one reason we love these sports, nor that one is better than the other.)

Basically, football is about masterful strategies, specialized roles (punter, receiver, linebacker, etc.), and strict lines of authority (have you ever heard anyone call it “circles of authority”?). Coaches, quarterbacks, and coordinators control every play.

Basketball, on the other hand, comes out of a democratic model based on spontaneous teamwork. The basketball coach cannot even intervene in most plays. Basketball is about role flexibility (every player shoots, passes, plays defense) and fast-paced improvisation.

Football comes out of America’s hierarchical, industrial economy and military strategizing, whereas basketball emerges from the more recent knowledge economy. Lines vs. circles.

It’s not just about political economy, however. Basketball, with its sweaty players in bathing suits, matches the growing informality and bare-all impulses of post-1960’s, mass media culture (casual Fridays, confessional memoirs, reality TV, Facebook, etc.). An ethos of social openness also plays a role. Circles are more associated than lines in American culture with equality and togetherness. Not coincidentally, basketball, the Circle Game, has skyrocketed in popularity at the same time that there’s been a push toward greater multiculturalism and gender equality.

But the sports aren't that different at another level. The heart of football and basketball, as well as baseball and other field games, is the Thrill of the Chase: players frantically trying to get a few steps ahead of their pursuers. And that's exactly how homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors have spent most of our time on earth: chasing and being chased. So let the beer flow and The Great Chase continue.


Further Reading:

All my posts about baseball (moonlight, the slide, Jackie Robinson, etc., minus George Carlin).

My related post, "What would George Carlin say about Baseball vs. Basketball?"

Arens, W. “Professional Football: An American Symbol and Ritual.” In The American Dimension, Arens and Montague, eds., Alfred Publishing, 1976. A wonderful, early anthropological essay on football, with insight into things like football’s resonance with labor specialization in postwar America.

Carlin, George “Baseball vs. Football.” Carlin’s famous stand-up comedy routine is funny, insightful, and a major source of inspiration here.

Geertz, Clifford “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973. An extremely influential example of interpretive anthropology’s method, though, curiously, it never led to as many anthropological studies of sports as you might imagine.

Mandelbaum, Michael The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do, Public Affairs, 2005. Mandelbaum is a professor of foreign policy, and also the son of the late, great anthropologist David Mandelbaum, a fact that becomes apparent in the anthropologically-minded sections of the book where he relates sports to underlying economic structures.

Andy Knipe, ALS, and Baseball

It’s hard to believe that my younger cousin, Andrew Knipe, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2005. I still think of Andy as an innocent, insecure kid, the second-to-last child in a family of five children, the tag-along. When our families got together, with eight of us cousins sitting at the table cracking jokes and poking each other, Andy was just trying to figure out what we were talking about and where the next joke was headed. We’d yell at him to shut up when he tried to intervene, but every once in awhile he’d crack us all up, usually by squeezing food through his fingers or reminding us about the toilet. His life of mischief was underway.

Andy on left, older brother Billy on right.

Over the years, I moved out to the West Coast, while Andy stayed in New York, got married, and excelled as the art director of TV commercials. His audience and humor had evolved. His jokes now cracked up millions of people all over the country. He almost seemed like an adult.

Andy in his 30s.

Then he got ALS, in his prime. He was 37 years old, with a wife, teenage daughter, and two little boys. At Christmas that year, he couldn’t make the salad tongs squeeze together, but otherwise he seemed fine, so I still thought there must be some mistake, some way out. But there wasn’t. ALS continued to destroy his nervous system, relentlessly. With each visit back to New York, I could see he was progressively worse. Soon he was in a wheelchair, hands propped on the armrests, unable to turn his head from side to side, barely able to swallow. His body was frozen in place, but he was fully alert, watching himself die.

Andy's final months were largely spent thinking about baseball and helping other people. He raised money for the ALS Association by making films about Lou Gehrig and other sports figures. (BBDO, the advertising agency where he’d made his mark, stood by him, keeping him on the payroll and sending a van to pick him up whenever he wanted to come into Manhattan to work at the office.)  He sent my 9-year-old son a big, heavy book, The Yankees Encyclopedia, which my son studied like the Rosetta Stone. He read that encyclopedia so many times, memorizing the statistics and biographies of every player from Lou Gehrig to Derek Jeter, that the covers finally fell off.

I hadn’t thought much about baseball since I was in Little League, but now that my three boys were playing it, and now that Andy was dying, I wanted to know everything I could. Andy sent me pithy emails about legends like Goose Gossage and Don Zimmer. I was relieved when he said Field of Dreams was one of the best baseball films, ever.

It took a lot of effort to send those emails. He put on a headset that tracked his eye movements, looked ahead at a screen, and then clicked with his index finger—one of the only parts of his body with any sensation left—on the word or letter he wanted. The last gasps of a dying man.

But with his last ounces of energy, Andy didn’t just send out Zen-like emails. He also got on baseball websites and clicked out messages like this:

“R-e-d S-o-x = S-c-u-m-b-a-g-s.”

Yes, he spent his final days tormenting Red Sox fans, the arch rivals of his beloved Yankees. Some of his insults were so disgusting that he got banned from websites.

After awhile, though, the emails and rants tapered off, as the disease took over every last inch of his body, including his insides. In August, 2005, he decided not to get an artificial respirator. At age 38, he wrote a final letter to his kids and got ready to die.

I couldn’t get a flight in time, but I called to say goodbye. Andy couldn’t speak anymore, so I did all the talking.

I said I loved him. I said I was sorry I ignored him so much when we were little. I said I knew he would be there whenever I was watching baseball. I had to fight through tears to finish my sentences--I was incoherent--but I didn’t want to hang up, knowing I’d never talk to Andy again. Finally the call had to end. A few days later, Andy was dead.

At the funeral, I found out that pitcher Curt Schilling had asked the other Red Sox players to pray for Andy. Despite his Red Sox affiliation, Schilling had become friends with Andy through their fundraising for ALS.

But the biggest surprise came after the funeral, at the lunch we had for family at a small restaurant. Suddenly one of my cousins shouted, “Sick Bastard’s here!” Looking over at the entrance, I didn’t see anyone who looked sick or like a bastard, just a regular guy in his 30’s. “Sick Bastard” was this guy’s screen  name. He was a Red Sox fan who had traded vicious insults with Andy for months, until Andy let on that he was dying of ALS. By that point, they’d spent so much time together online, trying to reach new heights of creativity with their insults, that they’d formed a friendship. Sick Bastard, who had never met Andy in person, drove down from Boston to attend the funeral.

This was like a soldier walking onto the middle of a battlefield during the American Civil War and screaming, “Wait, don’t shoot! Or shoot if you want, but that’s my brother over there and I’m taking him home with me.”

My cousins, all faithful Yankees fans, mobbed Sick Bastard, hugging him and treating him like a celebrity. Even after his death, Andy was still making us laugh.

Thinking about Andy six years later still makes me cry, too. My little cousin taught me what it really means to live knowing I'm going to die.

****************************

Links, Photos, and More:

Funny commercial that Andy made for Fed Ex (1-minute video, about Stanley Cup)

Curt Schilling's Words About Andy:
"ALS, three small yet horrifyingly fatal letters. Devastating letters because they, right now, are a guaranteed death sentence for its victims. Why is it, then, that just about every ALS patient I’ve ever met, including Andy Knipe, wake up each day with a smile? Why are they the ones that bring laughter and joy to a room of seemingly healthy people? I don’t know why, but I thank God each and every day for putting these people in my life, and my families. Andy was a great man, Yankee allegiance aside! He was, until his last breath, working to improve the lives of so many others while his withered away. Andy is the man you meet that reminds you, without a word, how lucky and happy you SHOULD be."

Andy with ALS and that constant smile that Curt Schilling mentioned.

Andy teaching nephew Ben to drink soda. A few years later, he took Ben to the horse races, as his sister Susan fondly recalls.

Why is Catching a Foul Ball So Exciting?

Credit: Flickr, SethSquatch.

 I think the excitement is related to the crowd. When you catch a foul ball, suddenly you rise out of the anonymous masses. Out of thousands of fans and against all the odds, you get chosen. The universe loves you, and you have the gift to prove it.

Credit: Flickr, Dizzy-eyed. (Check out the arms reaching upward, to the heavens. Beautiful.)

Of course, there are other, less mystical reasons why catching a foul ball is so exciting: the indirect contact with famous players, the thrill of an athletic achievement, the danger. But being loved by the universe—that has to count for something.

Credit: Flickr, Malingering.

Related Posts:
What Would George Carlin Say about Baseball Vs. Basketball?

All My Posts about Baseball/Field of Dreams

Vet with One Arm Makes Amazing Foul-Ball Catch (Video) 
I also love this comparative, historical detail: during WWII, foul balls caught in the stands by fans were sent to the troops. See Richard Crepeau, “Baseball and War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baseball, p. 87.

WWII Shark Attacks: What Survivors' Tears Teach Us

What makes men cry? That's hard to say, even harder when it comes to World War II veterans. They grew up at a time when men tried not to talk much about their war experiences. Some WWII veterans, though, have told haunting stories that help us understand what it means to be human.

I'm especially thinking of stories by survivors of the USS Indianapolis, the navy ship torpedoed by a Japanese submarine toward the end of WWII, leaving about 900 U.S. sailors drifting for days in the Phillipine Sea.





The USS Indianapolis. Credit: Flickr, Charles McCain.











Most of these sailors died of shark attacks, dehydration, salt-water ingestion, and drowning, but some miraculously survived. This is the way one book describes the scene on the third or fourth day at sea, as Dr. Haynes, the ship's doctor, went around checking to see which of the floating bodies near him were still alive:

"Son?" He [Haynes] lifted the head. "Are you with us?" There was no reply. "Son?" Haynes tapped on the cold, opened eyeball. When he found a reflex, he felt an immense sense of relief.

Then he moved quickly to the next boy. He tapped again; this eye was bloodshot and swollen--a sign, Haynes knew, of edema caused by ingestion of salt water. There was no reflex. It was like touching the blank and glassy eye of a stuffed animal. Haynes had to declare the boy dead" (Doug Stanton, In Harm's Way, p. 200).

Whenever Haynes found another dead body, he'd try to honor the dead by saying the Lord's Prayer. Then, while trying not to look in his eyes, Haynes would take off the dead sailor's life jacket, so he could give it to another young man struggling to stay afloat.

In a Discovery Channel interview about a year before his death at age 89, Dr. Haynes admitted that hearing the Lord's Prayer always made him cry years after WWII:

"And that was hard work, getting an oil-soaked life-jacket off. And then we'd say the Lord's Prayer and then let him go. I, I got to stop going into detail, okay? Because I'll start crying. I don't go to church any more. Not that I'm not a Christian. I'm a Christian and I believe there is a God. But they always say the Lord's Prayer. I'm crying, and I can't do that. And I must have known 100 men on that ship very well. And many of my friends died in my arms. Gave me messages to their wives and all that."

At least to me, Dr. Haynes' quiet pain gives even more emotional force to that famous scene in Jaws where Quint describes the Indianapolis disaster. I hasten to add that it feels crude to compare these veterans' horrifying, real-life experiences with a Hollywood movie like Jaws. I certainly don't take the comparison lightly. But for better or worse, that Jaws scene is how most Americans have learned about the Indianapolis, and it provided an emotional understanding of war, death, and loss.



I can't help but notice the overlap between what Haynes (and/or Stanton) said about the dead sailors' eyes--"like the blank and glassy eye of a stuffed animal"--and Quint's description of the shark as having "lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye." Both the eyes of the dead men and the living sharks are described with the same analogy to a doll, apparently because both reside on an eerie border zone, where it isn't clear if the living are dead or the dead are living.








Credit: Flickr, Mattk1979.







To people like Haynes, this would not be an abstract point. He lived it, body and soul. He may be like another Indianapolis survivor, Donald Mack, who has never seen Jaws and says he changes the channel when shark shows come on TV.


I'm glad that Spielberg didn't have Quint (actor Robert Shaw) choke up when he delivered his Indianapolis speech. Quint's delivery honors the sense of restraint that veterans like Dr. Haynes and Mr. Mack show.

But the tears are still there. At reunions, the Indianapolis survivors often pour affection all over Chuck Gwinn, the PV-1 pilot who first spotted them in the water and called for help. They call him their "angel"--and it makes him cry (Stanton, p. 218).

These men remind us that our eyes connect us with each other. Among the many animals on earth, only humans cry.



Related Posts:
Does the Jaws shark have the eyes of God?

What do Jaws and WWII have in common?

All my posts related to Jaws

Full text of our book chapter about Jaws (with more on Japan, and Hooper/Dreyfuss as an anthropologist figure)

Does the "Jaws" Shark Have the Eyes of God? (By Peter Wogan)

This question probably seems outrageous, but I think there's something to it.

Flickr, Mattk1979.

Peter Mathieson, for example, described the eye of the great white shark as "impenetrable and empty as the eye of God" (Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark).

In Jaws, fisherman Quint similarly emphasizes the emptiness of the shark's eyes when he says, "You know the thing about a shark? He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye."

So perhaps Quint, too, sees the shark as God—masterful, yet mysterious.















In fact, many early cultures of the Pacific viewed the shark as a deity. But the best indication that Quint saw the shark as God comes from Captain Ahab, Quint's obvious predecessor in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

When Ahab's first mate tells him that it's madness to seek revenge on Moby Dick, a "dumb brute" who attacked him out of blind instinct, this is how Ahab responds:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event...some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.

In other words, Ahab wants to find God by destroying this surface "mask," Moby Dick. It's a religious quest.

Melville is particularly fascinated with the whiteness of the whale. He wants to understand why this color "appeals with such power to the soul," and why it is at once appalling and the most meaningful spiritual symbol, "nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity." Melville finds his answer in the emptiness of the color white and its suggestion of death: "Is it that by its indefiniteness, it [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?"

Maybe Quint, too, wants to "strike through the mask," to see whether God lies behind the shark's indifferent facade, those empty, lifeless eyes. Quint certainly doesn't lack other reasons for wanting to kill Jaws: survivor guilt, desire to reunite with his war buddies by experiencing death the way they did (just before he's eaten by the shark, Quint puts on his old war jacket and burns out the motor of the ship, so there can be no return to shore). But Quint also may be in the grips of an Ahab-like drive to see what lies on the other side--to experience the mysteries of the universe through violent, religious ecstasy.

In fact, Quint has already tread the outer limits of the known world. During the days and nights of shark attacks after the Indianapolis sank, Quint found his boatswain's mate somehow both alive and dead at the same time: "I thought he was asleep. Reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water like a kinda' top. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist." Quint's experience here dances on the thin line between life and death, and questions the relationship between the two. Surrounded by death, the mate seems alive, but only half-way, since sleeping is a mini-death that we all experience at night--except this soldier turns out to be truly dead. In trying to wrap his mind around this mixture of death and life, Quint is like soldiers who say paradoxical things about war, such as "you never feel so alive as when you're about to die."

Understanding the connections between life and death is usually the domain of organized religion, but Quint is taking matters in his own hands. He's trying to see through the eyes of God.




Related Posts:

What do Jaws and WWII have in common?


Free Book Chapter on Jaws, with analysis of WWII, Hooper as anthropologist, etc.

All my posts about Jaws.

Further Reading:
Melville's Moby Dick with helpful annotations (free, online): www.powermobydick.com/