Billy Budd as a tragic hero
div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"> Coming to Billy Budd, we find that the hero here is a young, handsome sailor who wins our admiration by his good looks, his utter simplicity of nature, and his absolute goodness. Melville himself refers to this sailor as the “hero” of the novel, though not a conventional hero. Billy’s very good looks, simplicity and goodness prove to be the cause of his undoing because these excellent qualities and attributes of his give rise to feelings of ire, envy and despair in a man called Claggart who becomes antagonistic of him and tries to ruin him. But the hero Billy Budd suffers also from a certain vocal defect, which contributes his undoing. In the novel Billy Budd, Melville writes:
div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> Though our Handsome sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see, nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne’s minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No visible blemish indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling his voice, otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy , in fact more or less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the aren interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us. I too have a hand here. The avowal of such an imperfection in the Handsome sailor should be evidence not alone that he is not presented as a conventional hero, but also that the story in which he is the main figure is no romance. (17-18)