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Billy Budd, Sailor (Enriched Classics), by Herman Melville
Download PDF Billy Budd, Sailor (Enriched Classics), by Herman Melville
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Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.
Billy Budd, Sailor has been called the best short novel ever written. In his brilliantly condensed prose, Herman Melville fashions a legal parable in which reason and intellect prove incapable of preserving innocence in the face of evil. For all those who feel themselves threatened by a hostile and inflexible environment, there is special significance in this haunting story of a handsome sailor who becomes a victim of man’s intransigence.
Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research.
Read with confidence.
- Sales Rank: #38762 in Books
- Brand: Melville, Herman
- Published on: 2006-08-01
- Released on: 2006-08-01
- Format: Deluxe Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .60" w x 4.19" l,
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 160 pages
About the Author
Herman Melville (1819-1891), novelist and poet, was born in New York City. Working with Romantic materials of primitivism, individualism, nature and the Gothic, Melville produced a body of fiction that analyzed reality in both its social and metaphysical dimensions. He is best known for his masterpiece, Moby Dick.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Is Billy Budd a Political Allegory?
By Gio
Or is it an oblique admission of latent homosexuality? Or a cautious hatchet-job on a domineering father-in-law? Or a somber biblical morality tale, with Captain Vere standing in for Pontius Pilate? Or simply a prose prologue to a ballad in verse, which spilled uncontrollably out of its frame?
None of those interpretations is as indefensible as it might seem. Literary scholars have advanced all of them in their full armor of earnestness post-modernism. Possibly it's the elusiveness of a final interpretation that has made Billy Budd, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, so dear to the critics. Among the writings of Herman Melville, Billy Budd certainly remains the most fraught with ambiguities and uncertain implications.
I hadn't re-read Billy Budd in decades -- not since college, when I wrote a very long and stuffy term paper on Melville's treatments of the military -- and I didn't foresee reading it now. But one of my nieces graduated from law school last month and, at a family celebration, I found her telling me about one of her favorite professors, who structured a whole class around discussion of 'justice' as depicted in Billy Budd! It turns out that there are reams of opinions, by lawyers and law students, about Billy Budd! That it's a 'classic' of legal literature, although my niece suggested a widespread reliance among students on Cliff Notes! Whoda thunkit?
Denizens of literature departments have been predisposed to read Billy Budd as a personal revelation of Herman Melville's conflicted sexual identity. The story IS dedicated, conspicuously, to an old shipmate, Jack Chase, whom Melville had long previously portrayed in his complex novel Redburn. That novel vividly revealed Melville's 'alarm' at the discovery of homoerotic attractions. In Billy Budd, the nameless narrator explicitly probes the antipathy of the hostile petty officer, Claggart, for the handsome sailor Billy in terms of latent homoeroticism. The opera Billy Budd, by Benjamin Britten, commits the story utterly to such an understanding. Nevertheless, I find this train of thought a stub line, a siding where the engine gets to idle. There's too much of the text that focuses on law and discipline, on the historical mutinies that contextualize the tragedy of Budd's execution. Herman Melville was not just spinning word-wheels. He was too deep and deliberate a writer. Some readers have complained that the "story" of Billy is postponed too long by the narrator's ruminations; in fact, some fifteen pages pass before Vere and Claggart are introduced. Whatever more it may be, Billy Budd is a story about the sociology of life on a sailing ship-of-war. The pluses and cons of naval discipline mattered to the old sailor, even in his obscure niche as a customs officer.
So then, shall we plump for the 'political' or 'historical' interpretation? Billy Budd, according to the text, was conscripted in 1797, in the context of the British naval actions against revolutionary France. Melville wasn't born until 1819. Why then did he set his narrative so long before his own experience on a US military frigate? The merchant ship from which Budd was snatched was christened "The Rights of Man", and much is made of Billy's 'farewell to the Rights' when Claggart accuses him of mutinous intentions. Could we construct an allegorical interpretation, with the Handsome Sailor representing Democracy in its infancy? [If any grad student takes this possibility seriously and writes a thesis on it, I want footnote credit!]
Melville's father-in-law was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Lemuel Shaw, one of the most influential jurists in the history of American business law. Melville scholars have asserted that Captain Vere is a guarded portrayal of Shaw. That would, I think, imply a mixture of admiration and resentment on Melville's part toward his much more prominent father-in-law. A tinge of inferiority perhaps? I'll wager Shaw was intimidating over the dinner platters during family visits. The narrator of Billy Budd -- unnamed and not to be automatically regarded as the author -- insists that Starry Vere is a paragon of virtue and duty, yet at several points inserts doubts about Vere's deeper character, including a speculation about his sanity! The admirable Vere is despicably inadequate in his handling of the confrontation between Budd and Claggart; both the readers and the sailors on the deck of his ship can be heard to mutter against him. He cloaks himself in patriotic sanctimony but he deserves no adulation for wisdom here. Of course, he stands as a synecdoche for naval authority, for the tyrannical discipline against which Melville had strenuously protested in his early novel White Jacket. What happens to innocent, honorable Billy Budd is a potent example of what was hopelessly flawed in hierarchical society. The reader might be excused, I think, for perceiving Billy as "Democracy" martyred by self-righteous Conservatism.
And how about the Morality Tale? There are flashes of biblical imagery. There is the weird, mysterious description of Budd's execution by hanging, when his body doesn't twitch and jerk, as if he were sublimated into death without suffering. Surely Melville, whose whole life had been an agony of religious impulse in conflict with disbelief, had something in mind, some intended meaning. After all, he COULD have written a different story, a more palatable denouement. Honestly, I find less concern for metaphysics, for questions of God, in Billy Budd than in Moby Dick or in Melville's book-length poem Clarel. I'd argue that in Billy Budd, God no longer has a role. Perhaps that's the message.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever made much of the thirty-one line poem that concludes the text of Billy Budd. It turns out that Melville had sketched several such nautical ballads, and experimentally prefaced them with brief prose accounts. These were found in his papers in various stages of incompletion. Billy Budd, please remember, was 'unfinished', published many years posthumously, and subject to the decisions of various editors. There are assorted 'definitive' editions. The ballad Billies in the Darbies strikes most readers as an odd anticlimax to the novella, but if you read it on its own terms, it's as bleak a death-wish as you might find at the end of a Viking saga. The comfort of a burial at sea -- "Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep." -- was denied to Herman Melville, the dutiful husband and conscientious office-holder.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant but Difficult
By CJA
Melville is an exceptionally difficult author for the modern reader. His wind-up to the events forming the core of the book is unpardonably long. And he is an intrusive and wordy narrator who can't resist frequent digressions.
Still, once he gets to the confrontation between Billy and his accuser, Billy's impetuous criminal assault, and then the captain's moral dilemma at trial, Melville's tale is riveting. As with Moby Dick, the book is a morality tale with heavy biblical overtones. The captain ends up being a rather attractive, if misguided, reincarnation of Pontius Pilate, convincing himself that he his helpless to prevent the legal necessity of the Christ-like Billy's execution. In posing the moral dilemma of the sometimes impossible difficulty of being able to do the right thing in an imperfect world, the book is truly brilliant.
This book was commonly assigned in high school in the 1970's, which I think is a mistake. Modern readers simply will lack the patience to slog through it. This work is better suited for a college course, and the format of the "enriched classics" is helpful. As for reading it thereafter "for fun", only the hardcore book snob should undertake it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A Maritime Conspiracy of Silence.
By Plume45
Set in 1891 Melville's quiet melodrama remains a literary enigma, although scholars have poured over this story (which may have been published in a less than finalized format.) Well liked, cheerful and almost godlike in appearance Billy Budd, a foretopman, is peaceably "impressed" from the merchant ship, RIGHTS OF MAN--a common occurence during the turbulent years of Ships of the Line. But once aboard his new berth all his "rights" are stripped; he falls victim to the Master at Arms, enigmatic Claggart, a silently sinister man who for no apparent reason develops an instant hatred of The Handsome Sailor. He plots with a few underling ship's rats to make Billy's life miserable--with the ultimate goal of accusing him of Mutiny. After recent uprisings British Naval officers were understandably paranoid re any hint of mutiny--real or suggested.
Considering Melville's masterpiece, MOBY DICK, with its violence and monomania, the style of this novella proves a curious blend of extensive exposition, minimal dialogue and strikingly uneven pacing. Melville devotes many chapters which reveal teasingly little about the three main characters aboard the INDOMITABLE. The very name of the warship might hint of its proof against being conquered. But Melville slyly may have here implied that it was Conscience, Mental Clarity and Moral Compassion which were to be overcome. All such considerations must be subservient to maintaining a calm Appearance; officers must behave as if they did not actually suspect that Mutiny might be lurking.
The three main characters are loosely described; thus their motives and actions are not fully explained, nor are their reactions. With the abundant use of words of murky intention, much is left to the reader's imagination. Was this novel meant for the Thinking man--to muse and mull over the events swiftly spelled out and ponder quietly at leisure? Was there no other literary way out--to spare the innocent Billy Budd: victim of a brute and his own stammering under pressure? Were the two antagonists (though Billy did not realize his situation vis-a-vis Claggart until too late) doomed to being misunderstood by the officers set to judge them? Were there no extenuating circumstances other than summary drum-court martial and immediate punishment? Why did the officers involved in the review board doggedly take their cue from dignified Captain Vere and not pursue further inquiry? Why did Billy not reveal all he knew once he was in command of his tongue, closeted privately with his sympathetic, almost paternal, Captain? Is it common oversimplification to compare Billy to an angel of God, the innocent lamb to briny slaughter, while Claggart is spotlighted in the corner of the Beast? Readers must decide for themselves if Justice was truly, ultimately served and if so--for whom or what authoritarian ideal? Inviting room for afterthought....
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