A review by jakethesnake123
Billy Budd by Herman Melville

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.