Billy Budd as Political Thought

Art by Elliot Skow

If Moby Dick lets its enthusiasm run, Billy Budd, written at the other end of Melville’s life, is carefully held to leash. But neither book tells its tale straight; both are driven to pause and elaborate each moment’s significance, psychological, political, and spiritual. Near its end Billy Budd says this out loud: the incidents left to be related happen “within a brief term,” but their

adequate narration may take up a term less brief, especially as explanation or comment here and there seem requisite to the better understanding of such incidents.

The story’s incidents are quickly summarized. An innocent, good-hearted sailor, the “Handsome Sailor,” Billy Budd, sailing on a merchant ship, is impressed (forced) into service in the English navy. Claggart, the navy ship’s master-at-arms, evil by nature, perceives Billy’s goodness, hates it, and sets out to destroy it. He falsely accuses Billy of plotting mutiny, and the Captain urges Billy to respond; but Billy, who stutters under stress, finds himself unable to speak, and instead reflexively punches Claggart, killing him. Captain Vere, knowing Billy innocent of the accusation, and the killing to be a mistake, nevertheless has Billy hung.

The narrator’s expansions and digressions indicate that the story aims at something larger than a simple tale of a sailor’s tragic death. Maybe that something is just Pessimism, or Tragedy with a capital “T”: Pure innocence always meets Evil at a disadvantage, and loses the confrontation; good can only survive if it is not wholly Good. One character wonders, of Budd,