Billy Budd Good And Evil Essay

Melville pulls information from many different sources, including but not limited to the Bible, history, and law to describe his characters and the events in Billy Budd. There is also a clear example of evil and good displayed through Claggart and Billy Budd while the narrator stands in a grey middle ground that doesn’t seem like it’s been developed. The narrator’s unstable stance can be seen in the following quote: “At the least, we can promise ourselves that pleasure which is wickedly said to be in sinning, for a literary sin the divergence will be” (Melville 1596) In this quote the narrator apologizes for diverging from the story. The word choices that he uses like “wickedly” and “sinning” are exaggerated from the act of simply diverging. This is interesting because Melville plays on the idea of good and evil a lot in the descriptions of the characters in Billy Budd. Looking at this in the context of …show more content…
Some people may question the narrator’s validity in this passage because of his interpretation of Billy Budd being unable to comprehend the situation. There is hinting at this from Melville’s word choices such as “nonplussed” and “unintentionally”. By doing this Melville puts more meaning into the passage by displaying again that every individual has their own interpretation of another. By making the narrator appear to have no absolute truths Melville forces the reader to grow suspicious of any absolutes in evil or good in the characters as well as the dependability of the