A Study Guide for Herman Melville's Billy Budd

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Herman Melville's "Billy Budd," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535819459

Book preview

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Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative

Herman Melville

1924

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Melville died in September 1891, six months after apparently finishing work on the book, and Billy Budd was left unpublished until 1924, when it was discovered among Melville's papers.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.

Author Biography

Herman Melville's reputation seesawed from popularity to obscurity and back again over much of his lifetime and beyond, but now his position is secure as one of America's greatest authors. Best known now for his masterpiece novel Moby-Dick (1851), Melville first became popular as a writer in the 1840s for his novels of adventure in the South Seas: Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Born in New York City in 1819, Melville had been attracted to the sea and ships at a young age, and his first two novels, fictional romances inspired by his own seagoing adventures, were warmly received by readers.

After his early success with Typee and Omoo, Melville disappointed his audience with his third novel, Mardi (1849), which took a philosophical and metaphysical turn away from his previous narratives. More conventional sea novels Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850)—his attempts to win his audience back—briefly appeased his readers, but then with the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851, followed by Pierre in 1852, Melville had lost his audience altogether. Moby-Dick, a novel ostensibly about whaling but actually about the human condition, had found a small but appreciative critical audience, but Pierre, a dark, somewhat autobiographical novel, was a critical as well as popular failure. The public who had loved