With the shark cage stowed on board, the Orca sails past Montauk Point and sets a course of south by southwest into the open ocean. Brody sits in the fighting chair, brooding. Just as there's a suggestion of meaning in the sharpness of Quint's name, so the chief's name is only one vowel away from an adjective. His mind churns over feelings of inadequacy and outrage, certainty and doubt, and Benchley gives us a quietly poetic sentence that links the turbulent ocean to the cuckolded husband's state of mind: "Gradually, as the boat fell into the rhythms of the long ocean swells, Brody's fury dulled."
Brody tries to distract himself by engaging Quint in conversation about the shark. The fisherman has nothing but contempt for his prey ("They're stupid as sin.") and there's an inevitable sense of hubris in his words. He shares a brief anecdote of falling into the ocean alonside "a fair-size blue shark" - which may have been the spark of inspiration for the movie's Indianapolis speech - and makes a not-entirely-heartfelt reference to divine retribution. In a line that prefigures the movie trailer's voiceover, Quint says, "[God] made the damn thing. I suppose he can tell it what to do." When challenged, he admits that he doesn't "put much stock in religion" although, tellingly, the final insult he hurls at the shark ("God damn your black soul!") has something of the hellfire rhetoric that infuses Ahab's final speech: "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."
