Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Billy Budd, Herman Melville - James Duban (essay date 1983)

Billy Budd, Herman Melville - James Duban (essay date 1983)

James Duban (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: “The Cross of Consciousness: Billy Budd,” in Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination, Northern Illinois University Press, 1983, pp. 221–48.

[In the following essay, Duban locates Billy Budd within the liberal political tradition.]

Though not as preoccupied as The Confidence-Man with moral certainty, Billy Budd still shows that an “undemonstrative distrustfulness” is essential for survival: “[U]nless upon occasion [a person] exercise a distrust keen in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served him” (BB, 87). Billy, however, initially has neither a direct apprehension of evil nor any inclination to heed moral evidence of its existence. His is a simple-minded innocence, oblivious to what Melville elsewhere called “that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in...

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