"Why moralize upon it?" : Questions of morality and guilt in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and Billy Budd, Sailor
The question of what constitutes morally sound behavior informs all of Melville’s writing and, to a large degree, accounts for its continuing appeal. Some of the most probing examinations of the human capacity for good and evil can be found in two...
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The question of what constitutes morally sound behavior informs all of Melville’s writing and, to a large degree, accounts for its continuing appeal. Some of the most probing examinations of the human capacity for good and evil can be found in two short stories that Melville wrote for Putnam’s Monthly Magazine between 1853 and 1856: "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) and "Benito Cereno" (1855). Although very different in setting and "surface topic" – Wall Street capitalism on the one hand and slavery on the other – both stories have a very similar basic configuration: a confident person is unexpectedly confronted with the mysterious "other" that challenges his snug and comfortable outlook on life. In both cases, this other figure is dead by the end of the story and the reader is left with the nagging question of who is to blame for what has happened. This basic pattern also applies to a short novel which Melville began thirty years after writing for Putnam’s and which was left unfinished at his death in 1891. Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) shows yet another "man of the world" who is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, the devil being the iniquitous master-at-arms and the deep blue sea being the blue-eyed Handsome Sailor. While all three stories invite moral judgment of their non-title characters, they never openly prescribe what kind of verdict readers should pass on them. In the present study I use a comparative approach to offer some new insight into the nature of the moral dilemmata that Melville examines and the kind of conclusion that readers are encouraged to reach. The most important aspect that is considered is the way in which Melville uses narrative technique – and in particular point of view – in describing morally ambiguous situations. How does the choice of one particular perspective - first-person narration in "Bartleby", a limited point of view in "Benito Cereno" and an omniscient narrator in Billy Budd - determine our understanding and evaluation of the actions of the morally challenged ...
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