Billy Budd and the Articles of War

Abstract

A LLEGORY is often so patent in Billy Budd that many critics have found in the novel not a story but Melville's philosophical generalizations about man's fate and others have read the book as a statement regarding the nature of the struggle between good and evil. It seems to me, however, that the novel contains realistic elements worth examining and that one of these is Captain Vere's appeal to the Articles of War to justify his hanging Billy. As far as the three main characters are concerned, the reader is bound to have difficulty in seeing Billy as a human being rather than as the very type of Innocence or in finding much more in the Master-at-Arms, John Claggart, than the soul of Evil; but the other character of importance, Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, presents more doubt as to his representational function. Critics of an allegorical turn of mind have sometimes cast him in the role of God the Father and sometimes in that of Pontius Pilate;' and, although as God he has seemed to some critics a representative of Divine Justice,2 to others he has been the personification of Cosmic Tyranny.3 This comparative lack of distinctness in any allegorical meaning of Vere's performance arose mainly, I believe, from the difficulty of his problem, which Melville based on the real and widely debated problem that had confronted Captain Mackenzie of the U. S. brig Somers in I842. In using the elements of the Mackenzie Case, Melville appears not only to have retained the basic realistic problem but even, in his alterations of the true event, to have added tension and to have increased the captain's difficulty in choosing