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Analysis and interpretations

A story ultimately about good and evil, Billy Budd has often been interpreted allegorically, with Billy interpreted typologically as Christ or the Biblical Adam, with Claggart (compared to a snake several times in the text) figured as Evil. Part of Claggart's hatred comes because of Billy's goodness rather than in spite of it.

Claggart is also thought of as the Biblical Judas. The act of turning an innocent man in to the authorities and the allusion of the priest kissing Billy on the cheek before he dies, just as Judas kisses Jesus on the cheek when he was betrayed, are cited in support of this reading. Vere is often associated with Pontius Pilate. This theory stems mainly from the characteristics attributed to each man. Billy is innocent, often compared to a barbarian or a child; while Claggart is a representation of evil with a "depravity according to nature," a phrase Melville borrows from Plato. Vere, without a doubt the most conflicted character in the novel, is torn between his compassion for the "Handsome Sailor" and his martial adherence to his own authority.

Some critics have conceptualized Billy Budd as an historical novel that attempts to evaluate man's relation to the past. Harold Schechter, a professor who has written a number of books on infamous American serial killers, has often pointed out that the author's description of Claggart could be considered to be a definition of a sociopath, although Melville was writing at a time before the word "sociopath" was used.

Thomas J. Scorza has written about the philosophical framework of the story and he understands the work as a comment on the historical feud between poets and philosophers. Melville, in this interpretation, is opposing the scientific, rational systems of thought, which Claggart's character represents, in favor of the more comprehensive poetic pursuit of knowledge embodied by Billy.

In the 1980s, Richard Weisberg of Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law advanced a reading of the novel based on his careful research into the history of the governing law. Based on his mining of statutory law and actual practice in the Royal Navy in the era in which the book takes place, Weisberg rejects the traditional reading of Captain Vere as a good man trapped by bad law and proposes instead that Vere deliberately distorted the applicable substantive and procedural law to bring about Billy's death. The most fully worked-out version of Weisberg's argument can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of his book The Failure of the Word: The Lawyer as Protagonist in Modern Fiction [orig. ed., 1984; expanded ed., 1989]. Weisberg's close reading of the book has confirmed the central role of Billy Budd, Sailor in the emerging field of law and literature.

H. Bruce Franklin sees a direct connection between the hanging of Budd and the controversy around capital punishment. While Melville was writing Billy Budd between 1886 and 1891 the public's attention was focused on the issue.^[1]

Other critics interpret Budd's character as the antithesis of Claggart, the fallen angel. Like his peers, Budd is naturally good, but also has the courage and ability to believe in his goodness to the point that it is not accessible to him as a concept. Vere represents the good man with no courage or faith in his own goodness, and is therefore susceptible to evil.

Claggart is the archetypal fallen angel, a man who has abandoned his goodness for ego, and, knowing this, ie his own cowardice, seeks to seduce the flawed Vere and destroy Budd

The centrality of Billy Budd's extraordinary good looks—"the young fellow who seems so popular with the men—Billy, the Handsome Sailor" says Captain Vere—have led to interpretations of a homoerotic sensibility in the novel, as well as analysis based on Laura Mulvey's theory of scopophilia and masculine and feminine subjectivity/objectivity. (Quote from Billy Budd, Sailor Penguin Popular Classics, 1995, p, 54). This version tends to inform interpretations of Britten's opera, perhaps due to the composer's own homosexuality.

The book's concluding chapters raise anew a question that is implicit throughout Melville's story: How can we know the truth? The focus of chapter 21 on the court-martial impeaches that court-martial's—or, indeed, any legal proceeding's—attempts to establish "the truth." So, too, the book's multiple endings, and the doubt and confusion pervading the "inside narrative's" account of events aboard this ship, leave us totally in doubt about whether we can ever know the truth, even from an "inside narrative."