Benito Cereno

Herman Melville

• worked on a ship; was a whaler; lived with cannibals for a while
• when "Benito Cereno" was published, the Civil War was pretty much inevitable

Themes

• human depravity, sea adventure, slavery, gothic
• epistemology: how do we know what we know? (senses, reason, emotion)

Symbols

• San Dominick=self-contained universe, Oatum-Pickers
• Bachelor's Delight=success/prosperity, similar to Bachelor in Moby Dick, very male-dominated world
• Don Benito=means blessed
• Captain Delano=named after a Hebrew general, served usurper Absalom
• White skeleton
• Knot=symbol of Delano's struggle to understand; could also be opportunity to reach out to Delano through a coded message
• Key in the padlock=white supreme race holds key but now in chains and it's inverted; slave owners now slaves themselves
• Spanish flag around neck during shaving=Delano sees it as colorful decoration, but it's meant to lower the flag because it's now a rag

Notes

• rise of the U.S. vs. Spain
• it was a real event; slavery was considered corrupt at this point
• stance on slavery as a crippling state
• Babo isn't stereotypical slave: he's intelligent and small
• is Melville critical of slavery? He leaves Babo dignified in death
• Amasa is a fool - he's ignorant and naive
• Melville seems to be very against slavery
  
• are Delano's coughing fits on purpose? are they a cover-up or do they serve to distract when Delano gets too close?
• did Delano remain ignorant because he didn't know what to do with the knowledge, because he couldn't face the cruelty, or to protect himself physically?
• contemporary examples of skewed frame of reference: Bush (enforced democracy); Le Mun Wah's documentary on racism and white supremacy and naivete; creationism v evolution
• "Follow your leader"=does it mean that Benito was meant to follow Babo (in death) or Aranja (who was literally placed on the front of the ship); also, Civil war propaganda
• also like Orwell's 1984=words are all inverted, have double meanings
• told from Delano's perspective as opposed to Babo's because it's a mystery; also told from black slave's perspective which would not have been published then; furthermore, mysteries are all the rage during this time (Poe, Bronte)
• get main story from a deposition which is odd
• compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin (in which the lead black is docile), this slave narrative enjoyed strikingly less popularity, probably because the blacks revolted
• Babo's character=changes throughout novel; starts out sugary and false; are we sposed to be rooting for him, and is he the hero; shouldn't Babo have understood the evils of slavery
• inversion of slavery=this slavery was disguised whereas in the south the more slaves you had the richer you were deemed
• Babo's slaes had someone to rescue them; people cared about their lives and rights