|
Billy Budd, Sailor (Enriched Classics (Simon & Schuster)) |  | Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $4.95
Buy New: $1.12
as of 9/8/2010 09:21 MDT details
You Save: $3.83 (77%)
New (34) Used (25) Collectible (1) from $0.99
Seller: any_book
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 20759
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 160
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 1416523723
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9781416523727
ASIN: 1416523723
Publication Date: August 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781416523727 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A handsome young sailor is unjustly accused of plotting mutiny in this timeless tale of the sea. This Enriched Classic Edition includes: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information A chronology of the author's life and work A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations Detailed explanatory notes Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Brilliant but Difficult June 23, 2008
CJA (Minneapolis, MN)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Melville is an exceptionally difficult author for the modern reader. His wind-up to the events forming the core of the book is unpardonably long. And he is an intrusive and wordy narrator who can't resist frequent digressions.
Still, once he gets to the confrontation between Billy and his accuser, Billy's impetuous criminal assault, and then the captain's moral dilemma at trial, Melville's tale is riveting. As with Moby Dick, the book is a morality tale with heavy biblical overtones. The captain ends up being a rather attractive, if misguided, reincarnation of Pontius Pilate, convincing himself that he his helpless to prevent the legal necessity of the Christ-like Billy's execution. In posing the moral dilemma of the sometimes impossible difficulty of being able to do the right thing in an imperfect world, the book is truly brilliant.
This book was commonly assigned in high school in the 1970's, which I think is a mistake. Modern readers simply will lack the patience to slog through it. This work is better suited for a college course, and the format of the "enriched classics" is helpful. As for reading it thereafter "for fun", only the hardcore book snob should undertake it.
Is Billy Budd a Political Allegory? July 10, 2009
Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Or is it an oblique admission of latent homosexuality? Or a cautious hatchet-job on a domineering father-in-law? Or a somber biblical morality tale, with Captain Vere standing in for Pontius Pilate? Or simply a prose prologue to a ballad in verse, which spilled uncontrollably out of its frame?
None of those interpretations is as indefensible as it might seem. Literary scholars have advanced all of them in their full armor of earnestness post-modernism. Possibly it's the elusiveness of a final interpretation that has made Billy Budd, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, so dear to the critics. Among the writings of Herman Melville, Billy Budd certainly remains the most fraught with ambiguities and uncertain implications.
I hadn't re-read Billy Budd in decades -- not since college, when I wrote a very long and stuffy term paper on Melville's treatments of the military -- and I didn't foresee reading it now. But one of my nieces graduated from law school last month and, at a family celebration, I found her telling me about one of her favorite professors, who structured a whole class around discussion of 'justice' as depicted in Billy Budd! It turns out that there are reams of opinions, by lawyers and law students, about Billy Budd! That it's a 'classic' of legal literature, although my niece suggested a widespread reliance among students on Cliff Notes! Whoda thunkit?
Denizens of literature departments have been predisposed to read Billy Budd as a personal revelation of Herman Melville's conflicted sexual identity. The story IS dedicated, conspicuously, to an old shipmate, Jack Chase, whom Melville had long previously portrayed in his complex novel Redburn. That novel vividly revealed Melville's 'alarm' at the discovery of homoerotic attractions. In Billy Budd, the nameless narrator explicitly probes the antipathy of the hostile petty officer, Claggart, for the handsome sailor Billy in terms of latent homoeroticism. The opera Billy Budd, by Benjamin Britten, commits the story utterly to such an understanding. Nevertheless, I find this train of thought a stub line, a siding where the engine gets to idle. There's too much of the text that focuses on law and discipline, on the historical mutinies that contextualize the tragedy of Budd's execution. Herman Melville was not just spinning word-wheels. He was too deep and deliberate a writer. Some readers have complained that the "story" of Billy is postponed too long by the narrator's ruminations; in fact, some fifteen pages pass before Vere and Claggart are introduced. Whatever more it may be, Billy Budd is a story about the sociology of life on a sailing ship-of-war. The pluses and cons of naval discipline mattered to the old sailor, even in his obscure niche as a customs officer.
So then, shall we plump for the 'political' or 'historical' interpretation? Billy Budd, according to the text, was conscripted in 1797, in the context of the British naval actions against revolutionary France. Melville wasn't born until 1819. Why then did he set his narrative so long before his own experience on a US military frigate? The merchant ship from which Budd was snatched was christened "The Rights of Man", and much is made of Billy's 'farewell to the Rights' when Claggart accuses him of mutinous intentions. Could we construct an allegorical interpretation, with the Handsome Sailor representing Democracy in its infancy? [If any grad student takes this possibility seriously and writes a thesis on it, I want footnote credit!]
Melville's father-in-law was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Lemuel Shaw, one of the most influential jurists in the history of American business law. Melville scholars have asserted that Captain Vere is a guarded portrayal of Shaw. That would, I think, imply a mixture of admiration and resentment on Melville's part toward his much more prominent father-in-law. A tinge of inferiority perhaps? I'll wager Shaw was intimidating over the dinner platters during family visits. The narrator of Billy Budd -- unnamed and not to be automatically regarded as the author -- insists that Starry Vere is a paragon of virtue and duty, yet at several points inserts doubts about Vere's deeper character, including a speculation about his sanity! The admirable Vere is despicably inadequate in his handling of the confrontation between Budd and Claggart; both the readers and the sailors on the deck of his ship can be heard to mutter against him. He cloaks himself in patriotic sanctimony but he deserves no adulation for wisdom here. Of course, he stands as a synecdoche for naval authority, for the tyrannical discipline against which Melville had strenuously protested in his early novel White Jacket. What happens to innocent, honorable Billy Budd is a potent example of what was hopelessly flawed in hierarchical society. The reader might be excused, I think, for perceiving Billy as "Democracy" martyred by self-righteous Conservatism.
And how about the Morality Tale? There are flashes of biblical imagery. There is the weird, mysterious description of Budd's execution by hanging, when his body doesn't twitch and jerk, as if he were sublimated into death without suffering. Surely Melville, whose whole life had been an agony of religious impulse in conflict with disbelief, had something in mind, some intended meaning. After all, he COULD have written a different story, a more palatable denouement. Honestly, I find less concern for metaphysics, for questions of God, in Billy Budd than in Moby Dick or in Melville's book-length poem Clarel. I'd argue that in Billy Budd, God no longer has a role. Perhaps that's the message.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever made much of the thirty-one line poem that concludes the text of Billy Budd. It turns out that Melville had sketched several such nautical ballads, and experimentally prefaced them with brief prose accounts. These were found in his papers in various stages of incompletion. Billy Budd, please remember, was 'unfinished', published many years posthumously, and subject to the decisions of various editors. There are assorted 'definitive' editions. The ballad Billies in the Darbies strikes most readers as an odd anticlimax to the novella, but if you read it on its own terms, it's as bleak a death-wish as you might find at the end of a Viking saga. The comfort of a burial at sea -- "Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep." -- was denied to Herman Melville, the dutiful husband and conscientious office-holder.
 Ambiguous Greatness March 2, 2010
Bill R. Moore (New York, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Billy Budd, Herman Melville's last fictional work, is not as outwardly ambitious as his lengthier pieces but has earned a special - and indeed high - place in his canon. It is short with very short chapters and can easily be read in one setting - certainly a less arduous undertaking than, say, Moby-Dick, especially as the prose is relatively simple, at least for Melville, and the actual story is told straight-forwardly. However, as nearly always with Melville, there is far more going on than we may first think. This highly allegorical story reveals layers of meaning on analysis and ends up being one of his most complex works despite - or perhaps even because of - outward simplicity. Many of his usual strengths are also here in full force. Billy is thus essential for fans, and its general accessibility makes it a good place for neophytes to start.
Like most Melville, it can be appreciated on a very basic level as a sea adventure, though its lack of epic sweep makes it more limited here than longer works. However, great verisimilitude and strong characterization pull us in regardless. Billy is immediately sympathetic and eventually fascinating, while other characters - namely Claggart and Vere - are no less engrossing in their own way. Melville draws them and others with considerable vividness, adding much to the book's appeal.
Also like most Melville, Billy is notable for describing ship life so well and memorably that it truly seems alive. Though far more concise than other works, this includes a good deal of detail about everything from how ships looked to how sailors talked and acted. We get a good idea of what it was like to be on one, and this differs from other Melville books in focusing particularly on the late eighteenth century British navy. Readers can thus learn much about an intriguing bygone phenomenon, giving significant historical value.
Far more important, of course, are the deeper themes, of which Billy has many. Oscar Wilde said that all art is at once surface and symbol and that those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril; this proves it. The novel is clearly very symbolic, but as so often with Melville, we are far from sure what it is meant to symbolize - much less what, if any, conclusions he means us to draw. Few works, especially of this length, have been so widely and variously interpreted. The text's interesting history contributes to this. It was clearly important to Melville, who worked at it on and off during his last five or so years, but it was not discovered until the 1920s and correctly printed only in the 1960s. Yet more tantalizing is that, though seemingly complete, it was apparently not done to Melville's satisfaction. Even so, there is good reason to think the ambiguity is intentional, as the last three chapters overtly invoke fiction's limitations as conveyor of truth and indeed call into question how closely, if at all, we can know the truth about anything. The penultimate chapter in particular presents a very different account of events that had ostensibly been given objectively; the narrator suggests that they are distorted, but we cannot be quite sure. It is an unusual trick - yet another example of Melville's relentless form experimentation. Some may think it cheap or question its point and purpose, but it in many ways exemplifies the ambiguities of narrative, truth, and morality that had always been Melville's special territory. It is disorienting and on some level positively disturbing, but this surely is exactly what he wanted. All this brings us to Pontius Pilate's famous query "What is truth?," a truly thought-provoking question that Melville asks over and over again but knows better than to answer - if it can be answered.
Speaking of Pilate, it is at least clear that Billy, Claggart, and Vere are largely archetypal. Most see them as standing for Jesus, Judas, and Pilate, which is clearly alluded to in numerous gospel parallels, e.g., Billy's last words echoing Jesus forgiving his condemners. However, they could almost as easily stand for any number of other figures, such as those from medieval morality plays: Everyman, Vice, etc. Billy certainly represents pure goodness and innocence; he is a sacrificial lamb for Claggart who, like Iago in Shakespeare's Othello and other literary forebears, symbolizes pure evil. On the simplest level, their interaction shows the tragic consequences that can result when the two meet - a bleak illustration of Melville's dark vision. That said, few texts are more ripe for deconstruction. For example, did Billy really kill Claggart accidentally? Indeed, did he kill him in the way shown in the novel proper? It is after all extremely implausible, which can be chalked up to the work's allegorical nature but also seems to give the penultimate chapter credence. We must also wonder about Claggart - did he really hate Billy for no reason? If so, how did he descend from model officer to such inexplicable malice? Was it simple jealousy? This would seem highly out of character. Perhaps he really believed his claim...or maybe there was really something to it. In either case, why was everyone else fooled? The subtlest character of all, though, may be Vere. Is he a good and fair man trapped by absurd bureaucratic rules or out to get Billy in an even craftier way than Claggart? He has traditionally been seen as sympathetic to Billy but sadly obsessed with exactly following rigid rules, yet a close study of naval laws seemingly reveals that the pedantic claims leading to Billy's execution were actually false. Melville had immense knowledge of such niceties, meaning this could only have been intentional. We must then ask if Vere was simply wrong or evil in a truly subtle way. Also, do his dying words imply repentance - and, if so, why? Many other such questions exist; the book could indeed be interpreted near-endlessly, giving value far beyond its few pages. This is one of the clearest signs of just how different Melville's work was from Victorian contemporaries'; it is no surprise that he fell out of favor but even less surprising that he was revived in another era and became enormously influential.
The novel also brings up a multitude of other issues, including the conflict between science and other ways of looking at the world. A chapter following Billy's death pokes hilarious satirical fun at those blindly adhering to pre-conceived ideas contrary to observation out of a perversely misguided belief that they are more intellectually respectable, but it is far from clear if Melville means to mock science generally. Like many other aspects of the book, this leads us to question assumptions and gives great food for thought - a truly remarkable feat considering the length and seeming straight-forwardness. Other close readers have found a plethora of additional subtexts - autobiographical, homosexual, philosophical, and nearly everything else - with varying plausibility degrees. This makes Billy absolutely invaluable for fans and scholars, and few works have spawned such worthy and rewarding secondary literature, which anyone who likes the novel should seek out. Casuals will of course be less interested - if at all -, but the story is after all also strong enough to stand alone.
A good question is how one should purchase Billy; it is available in many editions both alone and in various collections. Most will be best served by collections, as Melville wrote many great short works, and it is more convenient - and of course - cheaper to get several at once. It is hard to justify getting the story by itself, but the dedicated will want to seek out deluxe editions detailing the text's complicated history and/or offering a critical sample. However one chooses to read it, Billy is a story what will not be soon forgotten.
Brilliant but impenetrable November 23, 2009
Michael A. Steen (Sciota, PA USA)
In this brilliant tale of the ambiguous nature of justice, the ambiguous nature of good and evil, and the inexplicable nature of man, Melville seems to forsee the id (Claggert), the ego (Vere), and the superego (Budd) long before Freud. These three men find themselves locked in a struggle over the nature of truth and the nature of justice, drawn into it almost against their will (including the evil Claggert). It's a fantastic work of imagination, and moral uncertainty. BUT Melville's prose style is nearly impenetrable. With constant digressions, and with unforgivably long and convoluted sentences, Melville succeeds most often in confusing rather than enlightening the reader. This could have been written with vigor, power, and poetry, but it was written more like a philosophical treatise by Immanuel Kant.
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. | |
