Billy Budd, Sailor

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1924

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-12

Chapters 13-20

Chapters 21-25

Chapters 26-30

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Struggle Between Morality and Lawfulness

The novella explores the tension between the right thing to do and what the law dictates. Several characters suffer because the law imposes harsh sentences or enables control over people, and Melville ultimately suggests that lawfulness does not equate to morality but often serves those in power.

The theme is most visible in the motif of mutiny. Jurisprudence and its codified rules attempt to impose order on the warships in the text. The laws are not ambivalent. This raises a dilemma for Vere. He is subordinate to the rule of law and to the society that empowered him with his position. When the surgeon wishes to tell Vere his misgivings, he thinks, “[t]o argue his order to him would be insolence. To resist him would be mutiny” (64). Vere would also have acted as a mutineer in the eyes of the law if he spared Billy.

The superiors in the text argue that order is necessary for an effective command, but rigid adherence to order and law also makes it possible for Billy to be condemned to die, despite the fact that everyone hates the thought of his hanging. Vere’s decision about Billy’s fate is the clearest example of the juxtaposition of morality and lawfulness in the novella. Vere prioritizes lawfulness over leadership and connection.

The text’s cynicism about superiors who uphold the law is best demonstrated through the Dansker, the experienced, world-weary sailor who expects dishonesty from people. He is hesitant to counsel Billy, but this is at least partially because he knows that retaliating against evil rarely changes things and that good men will still suffer due to evil men. The Dansker knows that, if he were to help Billy more proactively, he would become a target for Claggart as well.

The Dansker willingly detaches from his own convictions and conscience in order to hide from the ship’s paranoia. This represents the void between the law and morality in the text. To avoid the public eye, he is willing to let the confounded Billy flounder, commit a violent act, and die at the orders of Captain Vere. For the Dansker, fighting against the law is as momentous and improbable a task as fighting evil itself.

The Vulnerability of Innocence and Naivety

The narrator attributes a childlike innocence—which he describes as analogous to the child’s “blank ignorance” (50)—to Billy Budd. Melville doesn’t illustrate Billy as an archetypal figure of good, only of innocence. The conscious pursuit of goodness requires a more sophisticated understanding of morality than Billy possesses. Indeed, his innocence is the counterpoint to the evil on the ship, not his goodness, and it makes him vulnerable to the evil of others.

When Melville describes the Handsome Sailor, he doesn’t include innocence as one of the common traits. Billy may look the part of the swaggering, courageous sailor, but he is so hapless in his understanding, and in his defense against Claggart’s accusations, that he is ineffective. The ability to resist evil requires one to be able to identify it, and Billy can’t abstract a reality in which men like Claggart might appear friendly while doing evil beneath the surface.

Billy takes things at face value. Claggart recognizes Billy’s vulnerability and innocence, and that may be one reason why he targets Billy. As an allegory for Satan and his temptations, Claggart’s desire to corrupt Billy—to end his innocence—appears to be his main motivator. Furthermore, because Claggart is accustomed to lying and showing superficial goodwill, he assumes that Billy must be doing the same. Claggart wishes to strike first before Billy’s designs become clear.

Billy kills Claggart, but Claggart scarcely had a life worth saving or mourning, as portrayed in the novella. Claggart, on the other hand, manages to corrupt a rare innocence and end a life that was worth celebrating. Innocence and vulnerability are not useful traits for someone in Billy’s position, and it is because of his innocence that he ultimately meets his demise.

The Tension Between the Individual and the Group

One’s membership in a group contains the possibility of diminishing a person’s individuality. Melville focuses heavily on the effect that groups—whether large groups like societies or governments or smaller groups like the ship’s crews—have on the nature of individuals. One of the sailors’ greatest sources of unhappiness is that many of them are impressed into duty, and they are forced to consider the needs of the sailors and their duty to the military above their own desires.

Billy’s lack of agency in the text underpins this theme. He is forced from ship to ship without choice. He desires to be left alone and keep his head down, but Claggart wants to make an example of him for the good of the ship and another sailor asks Billy to join a mutiny. Melville suggests that subsuming an individual into a larger group, such as a group of sailors on a ship, leads to harm because it prevents the wants and needs of people in the group.

Melville hence suggests that the rise of military power makes it possible to squash individual rights. The leaders in the text know that an effective military requires enthusiastic masses of soldiers, but it grows even more effective when those soldiers march in lockstep, acting on behalf of the good of the apparatus, rather than for themselves. However, Melville conveys that the insistence on individual rights looks like sedition when society will not allow people to seek their own rights at the expense of the state agenda. Billy is the most obvious example of the cost of being unable to defend oneself and one’s rights. He is an individual who lacks the ability to communicate his views with the literal tool of speech—his tongue. Billy’s lack of insight into morality and humanity also makes it impossible for him to understand or engage with questions of individual rights in a meaningful way. He is singular among the other characters and is meant to stand out as an individual. However, his idiosyncrasies as the ultimate individual on the ship lead to his death, highlighting the frequent futility of fighting a group as an individual.