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Billy Budd | Introduction

When Herman Melville began working on what was to be his final novel, Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, his years of renown as a celebrated American author were well behind him. He had worked in the New York Customhouse for nearly two decades, until 1885, when he retired from his job and returned to his writing. Sometime between 1885 and 1891, Melville wrote a poem, "Billy in the Darbies," about a young sailor who had been executed for his involvement in a mutinous plot. In 1888, Melville read an article called "The Mutiny on the Somers," which related the story of three sailors who in 1842 had been convicted of mutiny on board the U.S. brig Somers. Melville's older cousin had been one of the officers involved in the sailors' conviction, and his family knew details of the case that the public did not know. A split between what Melville biographer Leon Howard calls "the inside story and the historical record"—what really happened and what was reported—inspired Melville to expand his poem about Billy into a longer prose work with the subtitle "An Inside Narrative." However, Melville died in September 1891, six months after apparently finishing work on the book, and Billy Budd was left unpublished until 1924, when it was discovered among Melville's papers.

Raymond Weaver's 1921 publication of his Melville biography, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, sparked a revival of interest in the works of the largely forgotten writer. In 1924, Weaver brought out The Collected Works of Melville, which includes the first edition of Billy Budd, and critics greeted the short novel enthusiastically, admiring its perceptiveness and its moral and symbolic complexity. Treating such weighty themes as duty and conscience, good and evil, justice, and guilt and innocence, Melville's final novel is considered one of his masterpieces.

Billy Budd Summary

In Billy Budd, a navy sailor is accused of formenting (or plotting) mutiny by an officer during wartime, at which point the sailor strikes the officer dead. To settle the issue quickly, the sailor is summarily tried and convicted by the captain for murder, and is hung at sunrise the following day. The novel presents different versions of the events themselves.

Arranged in thirty chapters, it is not until chapter 29 that the narrator quotes the official naval report on the murder. In no time at all, the events are summarized. "On the tenth of the last month a deplorable occurrence took place on board H.M.S. Bellipotent. John Claggart, the ship's master-at-arms, discovering that some sort of plot was incipient among an inferior section of ship's company, and that the ringleader was one William Budd; he, Claggart, in the act arraigning the man before the captain, was vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath knife of Budd." In the end, this stands as one version of the novel's plot, but the other twenty-nine chapters tell a different story.

Chapters 1-8 Summary
In the first eight chapters, the narrator attempts to sketch the histories of these men—first Billy Budd, then Captain Vere, then John Claggart. Billy is "impressed" (forced) into the British navy, then (1797) at war with the French. A lieutenant boards the merchant ship, the Rights-of-Man, that Billy has worked on for some time, and selects only him to bolster the crew of the Bellipotent, without any consideration of Billy's or the merchant captain's desires. Apparently Billy was selected because he has the charismatic qualities of what the narrator calls the "Handsome Sailor," a leader both physically and morally. Billy appears to be exceedingly simple, an "upright barbarian," but factual knowledge of him is limited to his status as an orphan. Of his family history only speculation is possible. Captain Vere, on the other hand, traces his ancestors well back into the seventeenth century; he is well read, respected for his intelligence and... » Complete Billy Budd Summary