Billy Budd Essay, Research Paper

Herman Mellville’s Billy Budd is and extremely divisive novel when one considers the dissension it has generated. The criticism has essentially focused around the argument of acceptance vs. resistance. On the one hand we can read the story as accepting the hanging of Billy Budd as the necessary ends of justice. We can read Vere’s condemnation as a necessary military action performed in the name of preserving order aboard the Indomitable. On the other hand, we can argue that Billy’s execution as the greatest example of injustice. The basic question at stake is: Is Vere’s conduct right or wrong? In either case, since Billy Budd is an ethical text, why is there an absence of the emotion guilt? Here we have a story about two murders. Billy kills Claggart and Vere (Although indirectly, the decision is ultimately his) kills Budd. Neither of the murderers show guilt in the form of remorse. For a narrative that tries to put the reader in a moral and ethical position, isn’t it ironic that the characters themselves don’t exhibit what would seem most ethical?

Immediately following the fatal blow to Claggart, There is no outlet of Billy’s emotion; whatever emotion he may be experiencing is not accounted for. This is not the behavior one would expect from someone who had just accidentally killed someone else. On trial Billy has this to say for his actions: “I did not mean to kill him. But he foully lied to my face and in the presence of my captain, and I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow, God help me!” This statement illustrates Billy’s emotional response to his crime; He shirks the full weight of his action by pointing to his accidental nature. Billy is sorry that Claggart was killed, but he states the utterance as a response without truly feeling apologetic. This statement is a plea to save himself more that a eulogy to Claggart, however a feeling of remorse for murdering another human being is nowhere to be found. His concerns lie not with the one he killed, only with himself.

After the Hanging of Billy Budd, the story no longer relates the events on board the Indomitable. For this reason we are never shown Vere’s emotional reaction to the decision to kill Budd. The only reaction we get is immediately before the death, when Billy cries out, “God bless Captian Vere!” At this moment, Vere “stood erectly rigid as a musket in the ship armorer’s rack.” Melleville accounts for Vere’s emotion at this point by describing it as “stoic self control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock.” Either Vere is completely indifferent, or he is overcome by the weight of the events and is physically frozen. In either case, no release of emotion is evident and Vere’s inner feelings regarding his action are concealed from the reader.

Essentially, injury can be remunerated by pain, which is vitally how punishment works in human culture, and how it works in Billy Budd. Billy’s punishment is a hanging which is certainly an infliction of pain. It is the punishment, however, that prevents the expression of guilt in Billy Budd. Punishment generally makes people hard and indifferent, and for someone to feel guilt he must feel it from within. The punishment inflicted by others has nothing to do with the cause. To read the story as either accepting or resisting an ethical dilemma is perhaps debatable. The point of the story may be to state man’s need to punish and retaliate with injury through means that may be befogged. The reader may be upset with the death of Billy Budd not for the seemingly unjust killing of a sympathetic character, but for its illustration of a society coming apart at the seams; one which doesn’t necessarily make sense considering human nature, but one that is so closely linked to social systems, it is doubtful that it could ever be changed.