Billy Budd (book summary)

Billy Budd

by: Herman Melville

Billy, an orphaned illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness and natural charisma, is adored by the crew, but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship's Master-at- Arms, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. When Claggart brings his charges to the Captain, the Hon. Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, Vere summons both Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private confrontation. When, in Billy's and Vere's presence, Claggart makes his false charges, Billy is unable to find the words to respond owing to a speech impediment. Unable to express himself verbally, he strikes and accidentally kills Claggart.

Vere, an eminently thoughtful man whose name recalls the Latin words "veritas" (truth) and "vir" (man) as well as the English word "veer," then convenes a drumhead court-martial. He acts as convening authority, prosecutor, defense counsel and sole witness (except for Billy himself). He then intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to argue them into convicting Billy, despite their and his belief in Billy's innocence before God. (As Vere says in the moments following Claggart's death, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!") Vere claims to be following the letter of the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War.

Having started the process, Vere and the other officers find that their own opinion matters little. "We are not talking about justice, we are talking about the law", that is, the law dictates what must ensue whether or not it is just. The law states that an enlisted man killing an officer during wartime (accidental or not) must hang. Vere spells out the awful truth and explains their inability to mete out leniency.

At his insistence, the court-martial convicts Billy; Vere argues that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir the already turbulent waters of mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged from the ship's yardarm at dawn the morning after the killing, Billy's final words are, "God bless Captain Vere!", which is then repeated by the gathered crew in a "resonant and sympathetic echo." The story may have been based on events onboard USS Somers, an American naval vessel; one of the defendants in the later investigation was a first cousin of Melville, Lt. Guert Gansevoort.

The novel closes with three chapters that cloak the story with further ambiguity: * Chapter 28 describes the death of Captain Vere. In a naval action with a French vessel named the Athée (the Atheist), Captain Vere is mortally wounded and carried below. His last words are "Billy Budd, Billy Budd." * Chapter 29 presents an extract from an official naval gazette purporting to give the facts of the fates of John Claggart and Billy Budd aboard HMS Bellipotent — but the "facts" offered turn the facts that the reader learned from the story upside down. In the gazette article, William Budd is a seaman but a conspiring mutineer probably of foreign birth and mysterious antecedents who, when confronted by the honest John Claggart, the master-at-arms loyally enforcing the law on board one of His Majesty's ships, stabs Claggart to the heart, killing him. The gazette concludes that the manner of the crime, and the weapon used, both point to Budd's foreign birth and subversive character; it then reports that the mutineer has paid the price of his crime and nothing more is amiss aboard HMS Bellipotent.

* Chapter 30 reprints a cheaply printed ballad written by one of Billy's shipmates as a kind of elegy for the Handsome Sailor. And yet the adult, experienced man depicted by the poem is not at all the young innocent whom the reader has met in the preceding chapters.

N\A 29/11/2010

Ενότητα: Book Summaries part 1

Πηγή: Wikipedia