Summary of Analysis of Benito Cereno

1. Summary of Analysis of Benito Cereno

2. Summary of Key Features and Aspects of Melville’s “Benito Cereno” • Formal elements • The use of limited-omniscient narration. The point-of-view of the story is third person, but really represents a biased, subjective (racist) perspective (Captain Delano’s). (See the top of page 2731 for an example of one of Delano’s many inaccurate observations filtered through the third-person narrator.) • The use of gothic conventions to create a mood of unrest, gloom, and foreboding (the gothic mode employs images of madness, decay, mysterious and sinister events, and claustrophobic confinement)

3. Motifs (recurrent images) • Impaired/imperfect/obstructed vision • Theatrics and role playing • “To Captain Delano’s imagination [. . .] the idea flashed across him, that possibly master and man, for some unknown purpose, were acting out . . . Some juggling play before him.” • daydreams, hallucination, sleepwalking • “Trying to break one charm, [Delano] was but becharmed anew. Though upon the wide sea, he seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in some deserted chateau . . .” • Masked faces and figures • “Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped about that part, either to protect it while undergoing a refurbishing, or else decently to hide its decay.”

4. Important Symbols • The picture of the masked figure stepping on the neck of another masked figure on the ship’s escutcheon, symbol of oppression and brutality • The breaking away of the balustrade when Delano leans on it, symbol of false sense of security, faulty assumptions upon which one leans and depends • The pervasive gray color of the sky and sea, symbolic of inability to divide humanity into black and white? • The deceptive tableaux of “the black upholding the white” • The ship itself, decaying remnant of feudal institutions

5. Themes (central concepts and ideas addressed) • The act of reading/interpretation and what determines how we read • Dehumanization • “the long-boat . . . Furnish[ed] a subterraneous sort of den for family groups of the blacks, mostly women and small children; who, squatt[ed] on old mats below . . . like a social circle of bats.” • Racism and essentialist assumptions about race • “Most negroes are natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction. . . . When to this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of bland attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors . . .” • Identity crisis and ambiguity • Willful blindness and denial of facts that contradict a comforting emplotment of slavery • [Delano’s] glance called away from the spectacle of disorder to the more pleasing one before him, [he] could not avoid again congratulating his host upon possessing such a servant

6. The ironies of the story • Employment of reverse dramatic irony to make readers feel foolish, along with Delano • The northern captain aiding in the re-enslavement of human cargo, fearing that Cereno is a pirate even as he sails in a ship named after a pirate ship (The Bachelor’s Delight) • Delano fears that Cereno is a pirate. His own crew acts much like a crew of a pirate ship, attacking Cereno’s ship primarily for the promise of its treasures. • Babo, whom Delano thinks incapable of intelligence, is a mastermind of an ingenious slave revolt • “But if the whites had dark secrets concerning Don Benito, could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid.”

7. Historical and cultural contexts of “Benito Cereno” • The recent Fugitive Slave Law (1850) that required Northerners to aid in the recapture of escaped slaves • The gothic novel/short story and its conventions • Ludicrous “plantation novels” that idealized master-slave relationships and comforted many northern readers • The many slave revolts of the nineteenth century • The 1839 revolt of slaves on board the Amistad • The successful slave revolt (1791-1804) against Spanish rule in San Domingo (present-day Haiti/Dominican Republic) • American slave revolts • Nat Turner’s revolt (1831)

8. Discussion Questions for “Bartleby, the Scrivener” • Discuss some of the many ambiguities of the story (e.g., why does Bartleby stop working? Eye-strain? Burnout? Perverse assertion of free will?). • Analyze the settings of the story (the office itself, the time period) and any symbols in it. What motifs are introduced in the opening of the story? • Discuss your feelings about the characters. With whom do you most identify? • Discuss the perspective from which the story is told. Is it reliable? How do you know? • What message you think the story is trying to convey, about what theme? Is the narrator the subject of the story’s commentary? Bartleby? Modern life in the city? The inability of one class to understand another? The stifling confinement of social roles?