Billy Budd and Other Stories

Summary

This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist. At first Bartleby works prodigiously; then, asked to check his copies, he answers that he would prefer not to, and gradually extends the refusal to all work, to leaving the office and finally to eating. The lawyer, baffled and guiltily sympathetic, moves his practice rather than evict him. Bartleby is taken to the Tombs prison, where he dies facing a wall. A coda reports a rumour that he had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. Benito Cereno (1855) follows the genial American captain Amasa Delano, who boards a battered Spanish slave ship off Chile and is puzzled by its sickly, nervous captain, Don Benito, and his ever-attentive servant Babo. Delano's assumptions about race blind him to the truth until the end: the enslaved Africans have taken the ship, killed the slaver Aranda, and are staging the performance of normal command. Delano's men retake the ship; a deposition retells the revolt; Babo is executed and Don Benito dies soon after, broken. The Encantadas (1854) is a series of ten sketches of the volcanic Galápagos Islands, including the story of Hunilla, a widow abandoned on an island. Billy Budd, set in 1797 just after the Spithead and Nore mutinies, concerns a handsome, innocent foretopman impressed onto HMS Bellipotent. Billy is loved by the crew but has a stammer that stops his speech under stress. The master-at-arms Claggart, consumed by an envy the narrator calls a 'natural depravity', falsely accuses him of plotting mutiny before Captain Vere. Unable to speak, Billy strikes Claggart, who dies. Vere convenes a drumhead court and urges conviction under martial law despite believing Billy innocent at heart; Billy is hanged at dawn, blessing Vere, and his body does not convulse. Vere later dies of wounds murmuring Billy's name, while a naval chronicle records the event as a villainous mutineer's crime.

Top Lessons

• Law and justice can diverge

  Vere admits Billy is morally innocent yet hangs him to uphold discipline in wartime. Melville forces the reader to weigh institutional necessity against individual conscience.

• Perception is shaped by prejudice

  Delano cannot imagine that enslaved Africans could plan and execute a revolt, so he misreads every clue. Benito Cereno shows how ideology blinds well-meaning observers.

• Refusal as a mystery

  Bartleby's quiet refusal exposes the limits of the narrator's charity and of a world built on copying and commerce. The story resists any single explanation of his behaviour.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Bartleby is one of the most frequently cited literary 'cases' in psychiatry teaching: his progressive withdrawal, mutism-like repetition, immobility and refusal of food have been read as depression, catatonia, schizophrenia or autism, as well as political protest. These are competing readings, and the story deliberately withholds an explanation. Billy Budd offers a surgeon as a minor character: the ship's surgeon pronounces Claggart dead, privately wonders whether Vere is 'unhinged', and later discusses the absence of the usual spasm in Billy's hanged body, a passage that touches on period debates about will and physiology. Billy's stammer, which fails him under emotional pressure, is presented as his single defect. Benito Cereno's lasting collapse after his captivity can be discussed as an early literary portrait of psychological trauma, with caution.

• Bartleby, middle and end

  Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.

• Billy Budd, early chapters

  Billy's 'organic hesitancy', a stutter that seizes him under strong emotion.

• Billy Budd, after Claggart's death

  The surgeon examines Claggart and silently questions Vere's sanity as Vere moves toward a drumhead court.

• Billy Budd, after the execution

  The purser and the surgeon debate why Billy's body showed no spasm at hanging.

• Billy Budd, early chapters on Claggart

  The narrator's discussion of Claggart's 'natural depravity', a quasi-clinical portrait of envy and malice.

• Benito Cereno, closing pages

  Don Benito withdraws to a monastery and dies within months, unable to recover from his ordeal.