Ambiguity In Benito Cereno

There are many subtle clues that hint at the notion of Melville spinning a web of deceit in Benito Cereno, but the most revealing clue that best exemplifies this is when Babo attempts to stab his beloved “master”—Benito Cereno. In what seems to be an emotional ending to the novella, Benito Cereno bids his emotional adieus to Captain Delano while holding his hand; however, after Captain Delano and his crew are settled in their boat and the bowsman pushes the whaleboat off of the San Dominick, Benito Cereno suddenly springs into Captain Delano’s whaleboat and is then swam after by three Spanish sailors who attempt to climb on board. Still unsure on what to make of the situation, Captain Delano spots Babo with a dagger in his hand, and believes that his intent is to stab him. With this in mind, Captain Delano flings the boarded Spaniards aside and grapples the dagger that is aimed at his heart away from Babo.

The short story of Benito Cereno cannot do much justice the first time around, as one must read it a minimum of two times to really understand the material. Melville's prose, which is paced rather slow and methodically, diction, and syntax, is not hard to read, but is quite difficult to piece together. However, as the strange incidents begin to pile up – the young black slave hitting the white boy without any reprimand from Cereno, the Spanish sailors seeming to motion to him, the whispering between Cereno and Babo, and the two blacks knocking down the sailors – the readers, as Delano himself, soon discover that all is not what meets the eye.

In Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Captain Delano’s perspective of the happenings on the San Dominick ship is skewed through the deceptive actions of Babo and his captive Don Benito. Delano’s belief that every human being is inherently innocent and honest causes him to misread the situation and leaves him unaware of the impending danger that he and Don Benito are in. Filled “…with a qualmish sort of emotion,” rather than investigating or confronting Don Benito when faced with compromising, unsettling facts, Delano chooses to continue his stay on the ship “…as one feeling incipient sea-sickness, he [strives], by ignoring the symptoms…” (Melville 64). It is this quality of Delano’s, choosing to ignore what is a blatant issue and opting to believe that everyone is a decent person at heart, which ultimately causes this veil to cloud the reality of the situation to him. Though his suspicions that

Delano was deceived from in the first by the look of the board, and thought of the fact that many blacks were roaming freely under the control of a few Spaniards. This idea in this research paper is supported with evidences from different authors in different articles. One of the sources that used in this research paper is the article "Truth is Voiceless". This article, Melville has constructed a fiction in which almost all language, including his own, is calculatedly deceptive or tragically inadequate.

Herman Melville 's Benito Cereno (1856) and Frederick Douglass 's The Heroic Slave (1852) provide social commentary on the evils, injustices and dehumanizing effects of slavery. Melville 's "Babo" and Douglass 's "Madison Washington" are similar in motive—the pursuit of liberty and destruction of slavery. The ways in which these characters are perceived, however, differ and stem directly from the author 's construction of the narrative. By examining the slave uprisings within the both texts, it is clear that Melville creates a story that depicts “Babo’s” rebellion as maliciously calculated, while Douglass paints the portrait of Madison 's resistance as rightfully deserved and necessary. Douglass 's novel is overtly an abolitionist narrative, unlike Melville’s Benito Cereno, which is quite ambiguous in its didactic message. Critic, William L. Andrews, notes that “The Heroic Slave uses the techniques of fiction to remodel the raw materials of history into a more meaningful and usable truth ” (Andrews 11). There is transparency in Douglass 's goal for the novel—to expose and unveil the atrocities of slavery (separation of families, murder of loved ones, perpetual subjectivity, etc.) and denounce preconceived notions of black inferiority. Madison Washington is a slave, but also a human being—not

Equiano’s rhetorical devices which include ethos, pathos, and logos abet to define and accomplish his rhetorical purpose. His ethos, or ethical assurance, is conveyed in his level of education portrayed by his sentence structure and high diction. Furthermore, as proven in historical documents, Equiano was a slave aboard one of the many slave ships. With this, the reader can accredit Equiano’s narrative to be a reliable and first-hand source to the journey of the “Middle Passage.”

Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819 so he grew up in a time where slavery was still common and accepted, but in an area in which blacks were treated with much more respect than they were in the south. His father 's relatives could be traced back to a man who was a part of the Boston Tea Party and both his mother and father had relatives who fought with the union in the Revolutionary war (Johnson). Melville had many jobs growing up, including teaching, being a bank clerk, and sailing on a whaling ship, which is what jump started his writing career (Johnson). Many of the stories that Melville writes take place out on the sea and tend to be quite adventurous and unexpected, much like Benito Cereno. This style is more than likely

In 1841 Herman Melville went on his second seafaring trip on a whaling ship called the Acushnet, his first being the St. Lawrence. The ship set off from New Bedford, Massachusetts and set sail for the South Seas. In June 1842, the ship stopped at the Marquesas Islands in what is now French Polynesia (Maxwell, D.E.S.). His time there inspired his novel, “Typee” which was popular at the time. After that trip, he joined the crew of the whaler Lucy Ann. On that voyage, he went on adventures on which he based Typee’s sequel, “Omoo”. After that voyage he

In the beginning of Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno", we were introduced with the character of Captain Amasa Delano. Delano was described as person with "singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms" (35). The description of Captain Delano implies that he is a good-natured person with an open hearted mind. Even though, Delano seems like a clever and experienced captain; during the events of the story he appears as a person who is naive to his surroundings. In my research I will try to answer questions regarding why Delano was unaware of the act that Babo and the rest of the slaves were playing.

In Benito Cereno, which was written by Melville in 1855, New England captain Amasa Delano comes

of the practice (86). Adler does not accept Schiffman's color analysis. She contends that black

    One might say we are presented with two fish stories in looking at Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, a marlin in the former and a whale in the latter.  However, both of these animals are symbolic of the struggle their hunters face to find dignity and meaning in the face of a nihilistic universe in Hemingway and a fatalistic one in Melville.  While both men will be unable to conquer the forces of the universe against them, neither will either man be conquered by them because of their refusal to yield to these insurmountable forces.  However, Santiago gains a measure of peace and understanding about existence from his struggles, while Ahab leaves the

Moby-Dick is considered to be one of, if not the, best novels in American history. Harper & Brothers first published it in 1851 in New York. In England, it was published in the same year under the title, The Whale (“Moby Dick”). Melville explores topics and themes that were scarcely spoken of and never even seen in a novel. In the novel, the Pequod, which is the ship, is named after a Native American tribe that was exterminated when the white settlers arrived. It is a symbol of death and doom and foreshadows event that occur later in the novel. Melville brings some very controversial themes to light in the novel. Revenge is one of the main themes of Dark Romanticism and Melville uses it to drive every action taken by Ahab. This is seen early on in the novel as Ahab explains to the crew why he has a peg leg and that he wants to enact his revenge on Moby Dick (Melville 160-161). “Moby Dick is, fundamentally, a revenge tragedy. It’s about one man’s maniacal obsession with vengeance. It’s about finding an object on which to pin all you anger and fear and rage, not only about your own suffering, but also about the suffering of all mankind” (“Moby

Melville sets the stage for Benito Cereno through imagery to foreshadow what is about to happen. In this monochromatic setting, it becomes clear that the story will go into a gray area (morally), and that everything can blend together easily and become indistinct so the eye becomes confused. When Captain Delano sees the San Dominick, Melville again uses imagery to describe the ship as “a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm” carrying “throngs of dark cowls.” (Melville, 6) Here, like the third paragraph, the metaphor of truth and deception is shown through the gray fog.

Published in 1851, the story of Moby-Dick is not just the tale of one mans search for control over nature, but also the story of friendship, alienation, fate and religion that become intertwined amidst the tragedy that occurs upon the doomed Pequod. The crew itself are an amalgamation of cultures, from the cannibal Queequeg, to Starbuck, "a native of Nantucket." The Pequod can thus be seen as a microcosm for immigrants and whaling within America. In Moby-Dick Herman Melville examines both the exploitation of whaling and the reality of being born outside of America.