Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Tyrus Hillway (essay date 1979)

Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Tyrus Hillway (essay date 1979)

Tyrus Hillway (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: “Final Flowering,” in Herman Melville, Twayne Publishers, 1979, pp. 141–44.

[In the following excerpt, Hillway discusses Melville's philosophical, religious, and scientific views and their impact on Billy Budd.]

Billy Budd comes close to being Melville's “Everlasting Yea,” though the affirmation is oblique, not positive. In Mardi Melville considered and rejected various creeds, philosophies, and political and social theories in the search for truth; although he offered primitive Christianity as a social ideal and safe refuge for those willing to forego the quest of the absolute. Moby-Dick, while Promethean in certain respects, makes plain the folly of a stubborn defiance of man's fate. Pierre defines man's helplessness in the search for the meaning of true virtue and his inability to understand fully even himself. In Clarel the arguments for blind faith...

[The entire page is 1630 words long]

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