Billy Budd, Sailor (Phoenix Books) Paperback – Illustrated, September 1, 2001

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I had to read this book for a college English requirement and was pleasantly surprised how much I truly enjoyed reading it!

No. It is surpassed by "Moby-Dick" and surely a few others. But if we revise the question to, "The greatest American novella?", then an affirmative answer can be justified. (What is the competition?) BILLY BUDD is an extraordinary work of fiction written at the end of the life, and first published thirty-three years after his death, of an extraordinary writer. In style and tone, as well as length, it is vastly different than "Moby-Dick". Yet it too is very complex, and it is deeply moving, even more so than "Moby-Dick".Billy Budd was a foundling and a happy, handsome, innocent youth who went to sea, sailing on the "Rights of Man", a merchant ship. He is impressed by a man-of-war of the British Navy, the "Bellipotent", where he becomes a foretopman. It is 1797, and the British Navy, recently roiled by several mutinies, is at war with the French. Almost everyone in the crew likes Billy, except the master-of-arms, Claggart, who Melville presents as the evil antithesis of Billy and who harbors a peculiar malice for him. Claggart goes to the captain of the ship, Vere by name, and reports that Billy is inciting mutiny. Captain Vere is quite skeptical, but duty is duty and he calls Billy to his cabin where he has Claggart repeat his charges and then asks Billy to respond. Billy, stupefied, is unable to speak due to his stutter; in frustration, he strikes out at Claggart and kills him with one blow.That summarizes the story through the first two-thirds of the novella. Now the question is, how should Captain Vere handle the matter? That takes up the rest of the novella, along with a brief epilogue of sorts. The issues raised are knotty, and the story is as tragic yet seemingly inevitable as in Greek tragedy.BILLY BUDD, perhaps even more so than "Moby-Dick", resists a summary interpretation that can be stated with complete assurance. (Melville underscores this when he writes, near the end of the work, "Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.") Many say that BILLY BUDD is an allegory. I won't quibble with that, but . . . an allegory of what? It can be seen as a political allegory of sorts, given that the American nation proceeded from the "Rights of Man" of Thomas Paine to the "Bellipotent" ("war power") of the Civil War and then the Gilded Age where the rights of the common man were negligible and trammeled by a mechanical system of justice. But just as readily it can be seen as an allegory of "The Fall", in which Satan (in the guise of Claggart) insinuates his way into an Eden of innocence, only now it happens in a world where there is no God. BILLY BUDD implicates such dichotomies as military justice (or justice under the law) versus natural justice; sanity versus insanity; civilization and its "moral obliquities" versus primordial innocence. (One popular gloss of the book elevates to prominence the theme of homosexuality or homoeroticism; despite Benjamin Britten's version of the story in his opera of the same name, I don't believe that reading finds much support in the text.)Near the end of his draft manuscript, Melville wrote, and then excised, "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what sometimes happens in this [an indecipherable word] world of ours--Innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute." Perhaps the best "summation" of BILLY BUDD is that of E. M. Forster, who wrote that it "reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory."BILLY BUDD is a classic work that delves into the conundrums of the collective human experience. Should you undertake to read it, do make an effort to do so with either the Northwestern-Newberry edition or the Hayford-Sealts edition.

Stored away in a tin box and unpublished until 1924, "Billy Budd" has since been released in a number of forms. The confused state of the various drafts and manuscripts and the resulting (significant) disparities among the work's many editions have only increased the multiplicity of interpretations of what is already an extraordinarily complex (but not all that difficult) work. Readers' understanding or pleasure of this deeply textured novella may well depend on the text they select; the version widely considered the standard is Hayford and Sealts's "reading text," which is reprinted in any number of editions, including those available from the University of Chicago Press, Penguin, and The Library of America."Billy Budd" is often labeled an "unfinished" work--but I think that this intimidating tag does the story an injustice, leading readers to believe that the tale will end mid-sentence, with Billy dangling from the plank of a ship. But this is no "Mystery of Edwin Drood" or "The Castle"; Melville's novel is complete. Instead, one might say it is "unpolished"--although the work's ostensible inconsistencies and errors may have been part and parcel of Melville's clearly unreliable narrator--an aspect common to many of his late works, particularly "Pierre" and "The Confidence-Man."So what's it about? And, more perplexingly, what does it mean? This tale of the sea relates the adulation and eventual persecution of the ever-trusting Billy Budd, the "Handsome Sailor" on a British merchant ship who, at the book's opening, is forcibly impressed by the warship "Bellipotent." In his new post, the innocent naif is worshipped by the rest of the crew, which arouses the dangerous jealousy of the master-at-arms, John Claggart, the protective watchfulness of the old salt Dansker, and the conflicted paternal instincts of the ship's captain, Edward Vere. The dynamics of the tensions among these four shipmates lead to a horrible accident which tests the principles of each of the survivors.At its most basic, Melville is a retelling of the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac (a parallel made explicitly in the text), but in this story God remains aloof: Captain Vere must decide on his own whether Billy is to be sacrificed on the rock of military discipline. And, even more obviously, Billy is the ship's Christ figure.But, biblical allusions aside, Billy can also be seen as the common man controlled by the paternalism of nobility. The ship from which Billy is kidnapped is the "Rights-of-Man," and "the dry and bookish" Vere (who shares his name with one of the more famous Earls of Oxford) is unsubtly modeled after that idol of conservatism Edmund Burke ("his settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise"). Billy's eventual transformation as a symbol of the strong arm of the law disguises what's really at stake: is it the preservation of aristocratic power--or the prevention of anarchy? (Melville's own sympathies were equally ambiguous.) More subtle still is the issue of race: the archetypal Handsome Sailor, mentioned in passing on the first page of the book, is "so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African." Through the compulsory act of impressment, Billy (whose "lily was quite suppressed" by his tan) becomes a slave under the arbitrary white rule of the ship.The book's finale and its understated aftermath never fail to amaze and sadden me. My amazement results from Melville's ability to turn what could be a treacly ending into a statement on democracy and humankind (much like he did in the less successful "Israel Potter"); the sadness stems from the obvious truth in the author's views on power and subservience. In spite of its being a slim and "unfinished" novella, "Billy Budd" remains one of the most multifaceted classics of American literature.