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Benito Cerreno Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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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. Melville’s plot unfolds very slowly, which is the reason for why some readers become frustrated with …show more content…

His word choice serves as keys to the understanding, or lack thereof to his story. He uses diction to obscure description, pointing to the conjectural expressions — ambivalent uses of words like seem, appear, perhaps, possibly, evidently, might, presume, conjecture, imputed, and thought — that appear throughout the stories plot. These phrases are similar to instruments of style that reflect the coating of false looks and unanswerable contradictory ideas that seem to bemuse human perception and inquiry, a sort of fiction in which things are never as they …show more content…

The perspective the narrator uses is quite tricky as we witness events through Delano’s naïve eyes - who I might add is not entirely reliable due to his racist and paranoiac suspicion of Spanish conspiracy. Yet, when faced with the position of seeing it through Melville’s eyes, we are still unable to obtain an objective narrator of who is entirely distinguished from Delano. The narrator often seeks to humorously make a joke of Delano when not depicting the story through his own eyes, because of this, the meaning tends to change dramatically in the second reading since the audience now knows Babo is in control. This shifts the readers mindset as we perceive Delano treated more ironically. When analyzing the story once more, one notices the efficacy of Babo’s performance as Cereno’s servant as Delano even comes to admire him on several occasions for his so called “loyalty”. Every time Delano reels and falls into Babo's embrace, we assume it the embrace of death as Babo continuously hovers over Cereno like Death himself, threatening to take his life should he make one wrong

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