Billy Budd and Moby Dick

Billy Budd and Moby Dick

The two highly praised novels by Herman Melville -- Billy Budd and Moby Dick -- have rightfully been placed among the list of great works by American novelists. And when those two novels are compared and contrasted through scholarly, peer-reviewed criticism, very different and interesting outcomes emerge. In this paper two critics tackle Billy Budd with entirely differing yet fascinating points-of-view, and a third critic presents a surprising aspect of Moby Dick; he links the novel with events of September 11, 2001 (AKA, 9/11). It behooves an alert reader of American Literature to search out as many critical approaches by scholars to each novel read. This provides a perspective that allows a deeper understanding of every part of the novel in question.

Thesis: Celebrated novels always have deeper meaning than the obvious literary lessons, moral outcomes and character development they present. Melville's two novels are of compelling interest because their characters and the conflict they create sew seeds of controversy and allegory. Those seeds, when they take root in the creative soil of scholarly examination, offer the reader a greater understanding of the novels and the world outside.

Point ONE: Billy Budd. Melville gave critics a prime theme to debate in Billy Budd: was Captain Vere morally wrong to hang Billy? What was Melville's purpose in putting stuttering Billy to death when the culprit who instigated the onboard tension was the villainous Claggart?

Dr. Thomas Claviez, professor of Literary Theory at Berne University in Switzerland, asserts that Billy Budd is considered among the most controversial novels in American Literature. Resulting from the moral quandary over Billy's hanging, the novel has created "heated debate" (Claviez, 2006, p. 31).

Point TWO: As to the structural reason that Melville crafted this novel (which was published posthumously) the way he did, some critics believe that Melville got in his "Last Word" because he had been in a "life-long [personal] struggle against authority from which he resigns by means of this novel" (Claviez, p. 32). Vere was facing a possible mutiny on board his ship, it was a wartime situation and he was obliged to come to terms with the tense situation.

Captain Vere admitted his heart was moved by the crisis on board, but he urged the crew to not "let warm hearts betray heads that should be cool…the heart here, sometimes the feminine in man…must here be ruled out" (Melville, p. 111). Claviez (p. 32) references several critics in his drive to flush out an understanding of the character's dynamics. Wendell Glick explains in his critique of Billy Budd that as unfair as it was for Billy to have to die, the captain's viewpoint was acceptable in justifying hanging Billy. That is, "justice to the individual is not the ultimate loyalty in a complex culture" (Claviez, p. 32). The ultimate loyalty must be to the stability of the culture, and if there is a conflict between justice to an individual and the "order or society" the choice must be in favor of the bigger picture, the society, which in this case is the crew on board.

Point THREE: On page 114 of the novel, Melville seems to be justifying the killing of Billy, and seems to be asking readers to go easy on the captain. Melville himself is believed to be the narrator and so one can assume that he the author is going out of his way to have an influence on the reader. Melville uses fog and smoke as a metaphor for the tension on board; the author notes that it is easy to look back forty years and see the wisdom or stupidity of any decision. But it's another thing again to "personally" when "under fire" to "direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it."

"The greater the fog the more it imperils the steamer," he wrote (p. 114). Every ship's captain knows that when there is heavy fog the ship must slow down to avoid colliding with another ship or running aground.

Point ONE: Billy Budd: Critic Eugene Goodheart is the Edythe Macy Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University. He writes that while critics are generally divided between those who see Captain Vere as "an unwitting collaborator" with Claggart and those who feel Vere was correct to have Billy sent to the gallows. In his piece Goodheart explains that Billy is "…variously seen as Adam before the fall, as a noble barbarian, as Isaac the sacrificial victim…and as a Christ figure" (Goodheart, 2006, p. 81).

Point TWO: Goodheart makes the most of his assertion that no matter what allegorical link to Billy, the protagonist is symbolic of innocence. When Billy lashes out at Claggart, it is due to his innocence. He is first of all innocent of the charge that he was leading a mutiny, Goodheart explains. Secondly, Billy is innocent when it comes to the existence of evil (Goodheart, p. 82); he is certainly confronted with evil but he doesn't grasp Claggart's false accusations as evil. And Goodheart believes that Billy's stutter itself is "an essential part of [Billy's] innocence" because due to his stutter he cannot fully articulate his case in this matter (i.e., his innocence).

Point ONE: Moby Dick: Meanwhile, Denis Donoghue -- professor of English at New York University -- links Moby Dick with the events and aftermath of 9/11. First of all, in the days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, President George W. Bush drew a line in the sand between what he defined as evil and what he defined as good. The good was anything American and the evil was embodied in Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And Donoghue argues from the point-of-view that bin Laden and the white whale Moby Dick were evil forces to be killed in a wild rage of revenge and retaliation.

Point TWO: Captain Ahab of course wanted revenge because the whale had taken his leg; Bush wanted revenge because bin Laden and the terrorists had attacked his country under his watch -- the first major attack on American soil since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Ahab wanted retaliation against an enemy that could hide deep in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean; Bush wanted retaliation against an enemy that hid in caves in the mountains of Afghanistan.