Very Like A Whale By Robert Finch Rhetorical Analysis

The human ego has an undeniable knack for inserting itself into the world. Yet, even with this self-insertion, humans want to stay separate from nature, beings sentient yet dependant upon nature, a sort of parasite which feeds on the beauty around them and fuel their massive culture from it. Author Robert Finch in his essay, Very Like a Whale, uses profound ambiguity to illustrate the pull on humans to the somewhat forgotten natural world.

Finch’s ambiguity is due in part to his repetition of rhetorical questions. Asking “what were we looking at?” (8) “What was it we saw?” (10) and “yet we came — why?” (14) all at the surface level are attempting to analyze the pull the beached whale has on observers. But, deeper, it is a question of humanity and that which drives our humanity. His question is why is it that as humans we observe such acts of nature that are so uncommon in the scheme of human existence, but are not uncommon in the complexity of the natural world?

Finch states that humans “need plants, animals, weather, unfettered shores and unbroken woodland… as an antidote to introversion, a preventative against human inbreeding” (17). This inbreeding which we must prevent from occurring is not an incestuous mess which would damage genetics and harm the gene pool, but the combining of human ideas without outside influence, that from outside our culture, which would damage our culture by leaving us without inspiration and ability to expand our consciousness and culture and leave us with nothing but stagnant remnants of old human existence. But there is more to needing nature than expanding the collective mind of