Reviews for Billy Budd, sailor

The average rating for Billy Budd, sailor based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-16 00:00:00 Joseph D Deacon "The Daemon Knows..." Such is the title of a book on the enormous influence of an ancient Gnostic tenet on American writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by our preeminent critic, Harold Bloom. And two faces of the Daemon rule this short but unfinished masterpiece by Melville... On one side, the dumbstruck adherence to painful honesty in young Billy, whom the captain of this 18th century Royal Navy Man 'o War calls "the Angel of God," and on the other, the slimy and envious maleficence of Master of Arms Claggart. Neither man is the picture of a stalwart seaman - they are both Odd Men Out. For just so the clash of Good and Evil Daemons within us evokes a veritable supernatural storm of Misrule... and ends in appropriate tragedy. For a nautical Daemon is also a Lord of Misrule. Now, the Lord of Misrule was a theatrical custom created by the old salts in bygone days... One selected raw-spirited Ancient Mariner would be dressed in a robe, crown and mitre, and paraded about the deck of the Man 'o War, as the young bucks partied with their generous portions of rum and perhaps a pipe and fiddle tune: a traditional seagoing perk on crossing the equator. But the Lord of Misrule - like his inspiration, Neptune, god of the sea - has a highly hazardous side, when mankind's good and evil sides clash in a fictional typhoon. And when Billy Budd crosses Claggart, King Neptune lets loose with a storm composed of all the furies of Hell. No, not a real, physical storm... The inevitable storm of justice in action. For as in a bloody Jacobean tragedy, when justice is done, ALL the actors are cut down. And all go to their Reward.. or Doom. So Billy goes to his Reward by answering their brute sentences of doom in blessing them all - echoing Rilke's Duino Elegies in which a released Arrow chooses Life over Death - and finds Peace. And Billy Budd is just such an aporetic work for which the only solution is in blood sacrifice. Because the staged shifting of guilt will wreak total Misrule... And then - the ultimate space of Final and Irrevocable Apocalyptic Divine Justice - Ends by enacting a bloodbath: For the Daemon, too, is liquidated in the end. But we readers, renewed by Melville's massive Catharsis, are FREED.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-08-19 00:00:00 Richard Vanderheiden Dear High School Curriculum Writers: I am positive that you can find a better novel than this one to use when introducing symbolism and extended metaphor to developing readers. "Christ-figure" is the most over-used of these extended metaphors; over-used to the point where its offensiveness ceases to be about the in-your-face religious aspect of it and becomes instead about the simple over-use of the symbols. If you want to "go there" with symbolism and metaphor and have high school age kids the ways in which literature can illuminate our experience not by representing it literally but by unhinging from it, try helping these students discover Garcia-Marquez or Allende. And that's just assuming you want to stay in the "safe" territory of the Western hemisphere. Ever your advisor, me.