Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust (essay date 1979)

Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust (essay date 1979)

Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: “‘Something Healing’: Fathers and Sons in Billy Budd,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, December, 1979, pp. 326–36.

[In the following essay, Hays and Rust interpret Billy Budd as a reworking of Melville's relationship with his own sons.]

Every thoughtful reader of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) feels to some degree or another the great power of the book which Richard Harter Fogle calls a “profound meditation upon a tragic theme of great magnitude.”1 Indeed, we are led to wonder about the motivation of Melville to write such a work out of the “quiet, grass-growing” years of his life, especially since he had devoted the last thirty years of his life to poetry. While considering Billy Budd a relative failure as a fictional character, Richard Chase asserts that Billy was highly meaningful to Melville:...

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