Bartleby And Benito Cerreno Analysis

In Bartleby and Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, crimes are being committed from all areas of the text. Intentionally or not, each person are being punished in different ways. Crime is being committed against humanity (slaves) while these crimes were not against the law. Justice cannot be served to anyone because no one is fully guilty. In Benito Cereno, there is forms of innocence that differ. With the presence of innocence within the mind, there is lack of knowledge of wrongdoing, and, results to atrocious crimes. When there is a presence of innocence within an action, there is an understanding that to accomplish something better, an evil deed might be committed. Therefore, there can be no pure innocence within a person’s thought or action. Thus, people who seems completely innocent must be putting up an act. …show more content…
He states “punishment, which I would call political obstacles, prevent the fatal effects of private interests …” It is eye opening to see the word political obstacles because in a way, the crimes done to the slaves were not against the law. Since it was not against the law, people could have done whatever and still not get punished. If there was a white person chained and whipped on the ship, then it could have be a crime against humanity in that time period’s rule of the law. While, in the case of Benito Cereno, we can argue that all of the characters were exposed to complete injustice. With fighting for his freedom, Babo was wrong for trying to hurt Cereno because Cereno was not the slave owner. Although Cereno was not slave owner, he was wrong for treating Babo the way his master did. Crime as Beccaria sees is a “social disorder.” Well, there is already social disorder within the ship that man is being treated as property but it is not stated by the law that it was a