Essays on Billy Budd

Herman Melville passed away in 1891 before finishing his final novel. Melville’s granddaughter had the unfinished work published in 1924 over thirty years after he had last worked on it. His work entitled Billy Budd, Sailor has been widely recognized as a great success and...

To read Herman Melville’s Billy Budd is to experience feelings of intense agony and helpless injustice. Billy Budd, a “Handsome Sailor,” adored by his shipmates for his intrinsic goodness, is condemned to death by a seemingly formalistic and unfeeling legal system (279). Falsely accused of...

Narrators of questionable credibility are common in American literature, forcing readers to think for themselves and make decisions about what to believe. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd: Sailor contain multiple examples of how the unreliable narrator can be...

The odd, one might say “queer,” language of the novella Billy Budd makes it difficult to not read Melville’s words in a sexualized way. In the beginning of chapter 11, the author uses wording that does not even appear to be normal in the maritime,...