Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Lee T. Lemon (essay date 1964)

Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Lee T. Lemon (essay date 1964)

Lee T. Lemon (essay date 1964)

SOURCE: “Billy Budd: The Plot against the Story,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall, 1964, pp. 32–43.

[In the following essay, Lemon investigates the discrepancy between the characterization of the hero in Billy Budd and the story's major themes.]

Billy Budd rubs against the grain, and it rubs intensely and persistently enough to be irritating. Our sympathies are all with the innocent Billy, and we are accustomed to having authors exploit our sympathies directly. Most typically, a pattern of meaning emerges from a narrative because our responses to the pattern of values embodied in the hero and his story are reinforced by the thematic implications of the setting, characterization, tone, symbolism, authorial intrusions, and so on. If there is an ironic discrepancy between hero and theme, we expect an author to let us know what it is.

In a relatively simple...

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