Herman Melville's "Billy Budd"

Paper Summary:

An analysis of Herman Melville's novel "Billy Budd" centering on Melville's exploration of authority, as intertwined with other moral and philosophical issues in the novel. Extensive textual analysis is used to reveal Melville's methods of using irony and allegory. Included is a review of the novel and a discussion of the central characters.

From the Paper:

"In Billy Budd Melville takes on the issue of authority, complicated by other moral and philosophical issues. The key word here is complicated, as Melville, seems unable to see anything in a simple manner. To Melville, life, like the sea, is a mystery, full of unanswerable questions. As a writer, he struggles to delve more and more deeply into the mystery while we, as readers, sometimes feel we are drowning in unfathomable depths. In Billy Budd, Melville continues the quest he began forty years earlier in Moby Dick. In his white whale Melville embodied everything fearful and unknowable to man. Now at the end of his life, he has a few more words to say on these subjects. It is my belief that if one looks closely at the clues offered by the narrative structure of the story it is quite possible to identify Melville's position in relation to the moral issues addressed. In doing so, however, one must keep in mind Melville's critical attitude, his love of ambiguous allegory, his godlike inscrutability and the possibility that to modern ears his subtle satirical voice may sound like perplexing perversity."

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