The Execution Of Billy Buddd Analysis

After a thorough analysis of Captain Vere and his judgment of Billy in her essay “The Execution of Billy Budd”, Barbara Johnson concludes, “what this means is that every judge is in the impossible position of having to include the effects of his own act of judging within the cognitive context of his decision” (Johnson, 599). Captain Vere is worried that, should he mitigate Billy’s penalty, despite the crew’s and his own feelings that Billy’s sentence is too harsh, a precedent may be set that will allow for improper judgment in future conflicts. If Vere were to ignore the effects of his judgment, perhaps Billy would have lived. Unfortunately this is not the case, and Johnson, passing her own judgment, writes, “what Melville shows in Billy Budd …show more content…
The opening line of the narrative, “In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now,” is at once declarative and humble. The sentence begins as if to prepare the reader for some great truth. The truth could have been something simple and personal, as in, “In the time before steamships I was a young man”, or it could have been profound and insightful. No matter the type, a truth is what comes after a statement like “In the time before steamships…”. However, before the narrator delivers this truth, he qualifies his knowledge, humbles it, by saying “or then more frequently then now”. The narrator is pulling back from his declarative voice. He qualifies his truth by saying that perhaps it is not so common anymore; perhaps there is less truth in it now. The authority is sapped from his voice and his statement is weakened, made less truthful, less valid. In the span of eleven words, the reader can see the omniscience of the third-person narrator transition into the unreliability of the first-person. One might argue that this narrator is actually expressing knowledge about a wider range of time, not showing that his knowledge is less reliable than it used to be. This is a valid claim. However, had the narrator wanted to express a wide range of knowledge, an easier way to have done so would have been to say something like “It used to be more frequently the case that…”, or “Although not as common as it once was, in the time before steam…”. This authoritative style is not the case. In its published form the line lends itself to a reading in which the narrator establishes his authority but also limits it. Melville has immediately brought first and third person narration into