Free Billy Budd Essays: A Deconstructive Reading :: Billy Budd Essays

A Deconstructive information of truncheon Budd   billy goat, who cannot understand ambiguity, who takes pleasant words at face valuate and then obliterates Claggart for suggesting that one could do otherwise, whose sudden blow is a dotty denial of any discrepancy between his being and his doing, ends up radically illustrating the very discrepancy he denies. - Barbara Johnson, p. 86   With Barbara Johnsons splendid Critical struggle we are willy-nilly plunged into deconstruction. At the moment I shall not sample to explain this radical and highly subversive critical mode, except to differentiate that what you are about to see is an example of it. At the moment you may well ask (being, as you undoubtedly are, still very impress by Drydens splendidly anti-naïve reading), you mean it is affirmable to be even more(prenominal) intelligent about Melvilles story? I remember asking myself the alike thing when I stolon noticed the chapter in Barbara Johnsons book on he-goat Budd. But I began to read it anyway and I short found myself in the throes of a critically different excitement The first thing that truly grabbed my attention was a remark Johnson makes apropos of the pursuance quotation from Melvilles story innocence and guilt personified by Claggart and Budd in burden changed places (62). The narrator says this apropos of Billy having killed Claggart. This is what Barbara Johnson says apropos of the passage in examination Interestingly enough, Melville both invites an allegorical reading and subverts the very terms of its consent when he writes of the murder Innocence and guilt . . . (83). Now thats deconstruction, folks Both invites . . . and subverts? screech   Needless to say, ALL CLAIMS JOHNSON MAKES FOR HER READING ARE SUPPORTED BY MELVILLES TEXT. What does Johnson, then, asseverate? I shall try to be as brief as possible about this splendidly anti-naïve reading. Johnsons first item on the agenda is to set apart into question Billys innocence. (Melville himself tells us that innocence was Billys blinder 49.) She asks us to consider Billy a kind of reader (Johnson calls him a literal reader 85). Billy is a literal reader in that he seems to take things at face value. He seems to believe, in fact, that things are what they seem to be. If Claggart appears to be slender to Billy (and he does) then Claggart must be nice to Billy (he isnt, of course).