Billy Budd Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust

Critical Essay by Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust

SOURCE: “‘Something Healing’: Fathers and Sons in Billy Budd,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, December, 1979, pp. 326–36.

In the following essay, Hays and Rust interpret Billy Budd as a reworking of Melville's relationship with his own sons.

Every thoughtful reader of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) feels to some degree or another the great power of the book which Richard Harter Fogle calls a “profound meditation upon a tragic theme of great magnitude.”¹ Indeed, we are led to wonder about the motivation of Melville to write such a work out of the “quiet, grass-growing” years of his life, especially since he had devoted the last thirty years of his life to poetry. While considering Billy Budd a relative failure as a fictional character, Richard Chase asserts that Billy was highly meaningful to Melville: “Whether he was picturing his own son Malcolm … or speaking of his...
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