Billy Budd By Herman Melville

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Ashore he [is] the champion, afloat the spokesman; on every suitable occasion always foremost”(9).
Despite his popularity among the crew and his hardworking attitude, Billy is transferred to another British ship, the Indomitable. And while he is accepted for his looks and happy personality, “…hardly here [is] he that cynosure he had previously been among those minor ship’s companies of the merchant marine”(14). It is here, on the Indomitable that Billy says good-bye to his rights. It is here, also, that Billy meets John Claggart, the master-at-arms. A man “in whom was the mania of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living but born with him and innate, in short ‘a depravity according to nature’”(38).
Here then, is presented a man with a personality and character to contrast and conflict with Billy’s. Sweet, innocent Billy immediately realizes that this man is someone he does not wish to cross and so after seeing Claggart whip ...

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Billy now finds himself in, Melville has us ask ourselves a question: Would it be right for Billy to heed the advice of experience and wisdom and tell the captain about Claggart’s conspiracy? Or should he instead keep his mouth shut and try to work things out himself? Being the good person that he is, Billy tries to forget about it and hopes that it will pass, but it does not. And that is where the fourth of these few characters comes in. Captain Vere, with his love for knowledge and books, and “… his settled convictions [which stood] as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion, social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, ...

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