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meghanh2020's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
funny
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
topbob's review
4.0
Unlike Benito Cereno, the meandering prose is not clarified but is instead left hanging. Regardless, the last 10 chapters stand out as a masterpiece of literature, and the somber end was quite profound.
askmashka's review against another edition
adventurous
reflective
sad
medium-paced
volet's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
missy_reading's review
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
jakethesnake123's review against another edition
3.0
Hello I finished this 10 minutes before class but that’s cool! This was an interesting read; it was very short. However, while some parts had absolute clarity I found a lot of parts did not. I found that the narrator broke the flow of the story by telling us about the characters instead of showing, and those were the parts didn’t make sense. When the narrator was talking about the narrative it made perfect sense. I also felt that the narrator would “spike the ball into your court,” so to speak, he would allude to what was going to happen; which again was telling instead of showing. Maybe this was to allude to the oracle character and his role? I thought the commentary about law and impressment and the historical context to be rather fascinating. Overall it left me with a lot to think about but at times the structure and narration got in the way of appreciating the themes.
wildbear's review
2.0
Gets better as it gets going but ultimately too tenuous to justify even its relatively small page count; and the prose, at times, somehow felt much harder and more inscrutable than Moby Dick too, without one-tenths of the rewards. Again, I started detecting some pulses towards the end so I might come around to it but as stands this was quite a tedious read.
bookishwendy's review
4.0
I really appreciated the moral ambiguity and complex psychology of this little court-martial drama.
My edition was intended for highschoolers, I suppose, and it included an overly-simplistic (and, I thought, rather idiotic) "scholarly" introduction about symbolism, and how this was a good vs. evil tale with clear-cut morality and religiosity. I skimmed through it to see if the intro might touch on the lgbtq themes that are so much fun to read in Melville, but no, nothing of the sort. I soon saw for myself that Melville is too smart, too clever, and too downright skeptical, to brush his characters with broad strokes of "good" or evil" or "Christlike", and while he does toy with those themes he seems much more interested in psychology, madness, and incomprehensible motives. Only this time instead of a whale driving Ahab to madness, here a Handsome Young Sailor inflicts a more subtle form of insanity upon a normally consistent warrant officer, and possibly on the ship's captain as well.
The biggest barrier to this novella, I think, is Melville's tortuous Victorian prose, and the lengthy throat-clearing the author seems to require to get to the crux of the story. Perhaps the manuscript's unfinished state on Melville's death had much to do with that. But I found that with a lot of patience (and more than a few rereads of entire pages requiring me to untangle convoluted sentences) I got into story more than I'd expected. I found myself reminded of the play/film Breaker Morant about three Australian officers court-martialed for war crimes during the Boer War. Military justice plays out differently than civilian peacetime justice, and everyone involved perceives the alleged crimes through a variety of lenses. There's a bit of that kaleidoscopic approach in both Breaker and Billy Budd.
Full disclosure: I was disappointed by the lack of fun romantic moments that so delighted me in the first 50 pages of Moby Dick. Ishmael and Queequeg might possibly be my favorite literary "couple", but there's none of that here. Put your serious face on for this one.
My edition was intended for highschoolers, I suppose, and it included an overly-simplistic (and, I thought, rather idiotic) "scholarly" introduction about symbolism, and how this was a good vs. evil tale with clear-cut morality and religiosity. I skimmed through it to see if the intro might touch on the lgbtq themes that are so much fun to read in Melville, but no, nothing of the sort. I soon saw for myself that Melville is too smart, too clever, and too downright skeptical, to brush his characters with broad strokes of "good" or evil" or "Christlike", and while he does toy with those themes he seems much more interested in psychology, madness, and incomprehensible motives. Only this time instead of a whale driving Ahab to madness, here a Handsome Young Sailor inflicts a more subtle form of insanity upon a normally consistent warrant officer, and possibly on the ship's captain as well.
The biggest barrier to this novella, I think, is Melville's tortuous Victorian prose, and the lengthy throat-clearing the author seems to require to get to the crux of the story. Perhaps the manuscript's unfinished state on Melville's death had much to do with that. But I found that with a lot of patience (and more than a few rereads of entire pages requiring me to untangle convoluted sentences) I got into story more than I'd expected. I found myself reminded of the play/film Breaker Morant about three Australian officers court-martialed for war crimes during the Boer War. Military justice plays out differently than civilian peacetime justice, and everyone involved perceives the alleged crimes through a variety of lenses. There's a bit of that kaleidoscopic approach in both Breaker and Billy Budd.
Full disclosure: I was disappointed by the lack of fun romantic moments that so delighted me in the first 50 pages of Moby Dick. Ishmael and Queequeg might possibly be my favorite literary "couple", but there's none of that here. Put your serious face on for this one.
sirlancereads's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
I was surprised I found myself reading another Herman Melville book as I read Moby Dick a few years ago and did not enjoy it. The only appeal for this novel was that it was short and my sole motivation for reading it was it's connection to a favorite author of mine: E.M. Forster.
That being sad, I thought this was substantially better than Moby Dick (in my opinion) and enjoyed the tragedy of Billy Budd.
That being sad, I thought this was substantially better than Moby Dick (in my opinion) and enjoyed the tragedy of Billy Budd.