Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative

Pros: Brilliant ideas for discussion
Cons: Tedious and difficult reading

An allegory is a method of representation in which a person, abstract idea, or event stands for itself and for something else. In Melville’s Billy Budd , there is a clear moral allegory of Billy’s experience and death as compared to that of ...

Pros: good plot
Cons: none

In Billy Budd, a character in the story holds the fate of Billy Budd in his hands. However, this character, whose name is Wyatt, is unable to find a loophole in the justice system that can punish Billy Budd by any alternate means. It can be proven that...

Pros: Neat facts, thought-provoking lesson on law
Cons: Hard read for some, many digressions (though not as many as Moby Dick)

Reading Herman Melville's book for the second time, I found that it made an interesting perspective on the law and human judgment, and how they sometimes come into conflict.

Throughout life and history, laws have been around to define the...

Pros: Great story line
Cons: Too many big words

I recommend this book only to the extremely intellectual reader. For a short text, it took me an unusually long time to read this novel.
Melville often takes the long way around the world when writing. His sentence structure is very different...