Billy Budd, Sailor

Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor is evidently an extremely divisive text when one considers the amount of dissension and disagreement it has generated critically. The criticism has essentially focused around what could be called the dichotomy of acceptance vs. resistance. On the one hand we can read the story as accepting the slaughter of Billy Budd as the necessary ends of justice. We can read Vere’s condemnation as a necessary military action performed …

…reader for an alignment with this viewpoint, then perhaps the reader "gags" at the death of Billy Budd not for the seemingly unfair and unjust killing of a sympathetic character, but instead for its illustration of a social system inherently disjointed at its foundation; one which doesn’t make sense considering human nature, but one which is so inextricably linked to society that it is doubtful that it could ever, or will ever, be changed.