“… its me, not the sentence they'll suspend”— Billy in the Darbies 1

Herman Melville's last prose work, Billy Budd , has generated controversy since the time of its first publication. Of course, such interpretive difficulty is perversely consonant with later Melville productions. His narratives involve asymmetrical versions of the same incident, striking lacunae, narrators of questionable reliability, so that critics hold polarized views of Melville's final message. In the following pages I am going to suggest another perspective: viewing the text as a whole reveals a construed discordance, allowing the reader to go beyond the alternative rationales woven by the narrator and the Captain, who appropriate and rewrite Billy Budd into their own, rather different, master narratives. This is to say that when the accounts are placed beside each other, offering alternative versions — another is allowed. By destabilizing the ideal validity of either transcendent discourse, Melville opens up the matter of choice: The abrogation of individual ethics — for the Captain, for the narrator, for the reader — is a matter of individual ethics.