Otherness is commonly a force of causing an individual to be separated from a majority group and, therefore, treated differently. The separation from the group has a large enough effect to cause otherness to be a major characterization of slaves in literature. Othering as a characterization normally denotes disempowerment, discrimination, and judgment. Yet, the story of Benito Cereno, where a whaling ship captain named Delano ends up finding and helping a merchant ship quell a slave rebellion, defies these conventions. Babo, the slave that starts the rebellion, highlights the subtle paradoxical nature of others leading to a reversal of the expected othering process. Before Looking at specific passage, a few terms need to be clarified. Two …show more content…
First, Babo attempts to avoid othering through inclusion. However, Babo is more likely to be treated differently and individuals are more likely to focus on his othering qualities the more Babo tries to blend into the group. This particularly stands out when Delano offers to buy Babo even though he has already expressed that “such a friend; slave I cannot call [Babo]” and “[Babo] seems…a sort of privy councilor” inferring inclusion in the group, friends (Melville pg. 47, 57). Yet, immediately after referencing this he point out Babo’s “Animal humor” and later Delano says, “I should like to have your man here myself—what will you take for him,” othering Babo by focusing on his servitude as well as relating him to an animal (Melville pg. 57, 61). Delano goes further when he thinks, “could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks”, again referring to a very inclusive position in the group before saying, “but [blacks] are too stupid” (Melville pg. 65). It is almost ironic that the more connected to Benito and the ship’s group Babo tries to appear, the more othered he becomes to Delano. This is also true for the narrator who uses words such as “black”, “Negro”, and “fox” throughout this section of the book (Melville pg. 65). Coming together, Babo’s attempts to be included in the group forms a paradox of inclusion leading to an increase in …show more content…
Right after Babo’s execution, when Delano is looking at Babo’s severed head, the story reflects, “[Babo’s] head, that hive of subtlety…met, unabashed, the gazes of whites” (Melville pg. 104). Here despite being recognized as “not human”, “black”, and other, Babo is on the same level as the whites (Melville pg. 103). He can literally look them in the eye “unabashed”, without any feelings of separation or wrong. He is seen as being intelligent enough to be recognized as such by the whites. In addition, the third person narrator has an open literacy where the sentiments of the narrator reflect Delano’s thoughts. In accordance, the description has Delano beginning to see the more human, inclusive qualities of Babo. The narrator goes further; he makes Babo surpass the white group and human ability fully. He is able to see “towards St. Bartholomew’s church, in whose vaults…and across the Rimac bridge looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia” (Melville pg. 104). It makes Babo seem almost clairvoyant. He is able to see great distances across streets, rivers, and mountains despite being dead. The structure of the third person narrator also blurs the lines between Babo’s sight and the narrator’s comments. Though there is a break signified by a comma between what Babo sees and
There are other contrasting aspects of the stories that call for attention. Most significantly Benito Cereno – ultimately – portrays slaves as evil and Babo as the mind behind the cunning plan that deceives Captain Delano. The reason for this one-sided representation is naturally the fact that we experience the story from Delano’s point of view. In the beginning, we perceive Babo as the typical docile, helpful, and faithful servant so often portrayed in other slave characters such as Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Jim in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Babo is more than just a slave; he is a “faithful fellow”, “a friend that cannot be called slave” . And despite all the underlying hints of a slave insurrection, Delano does not grasp their meaning. Examples are the slaves’ treatment of the Spanish sailors and the hatchet polishers , but in Delano’s narrow-minded world, only the white man is capable of conceiving plans of ‘evil’. And when he – and the reader too – finally sees “the mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt”, he is embarrassed and “with infinite pity he [withdraws] his hold from Don Benito” . From this moment on, Babo is a malign devil and Melville removes speech from Babo’s mouth. This strengthen our opinion of Babo as ‘evil’ even more, for how can we sympathise with him without hearing his version of the story? Apparently, Melville proposes no other alternative for the reader than to sympathise with the white slave owner Don Benito, whom Babo so ingeniously deceives.
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
In comparison to other slaves that are discussed over time, Olaudah Equiano truly does lead an ‘interesting’ life. While his time as a slave was very poor, there are certainly other slaves that he mentions that received far more damaging treatment than he did. In turn, this inspires him to fight for the abolishment of slavery. By pointing out both negative and positive events that occurred, the treatment he received from all of his masters, the impact that religion had on his life and how abolishing slavery could benefit the future of everyone as a whole, Equiano develops a compelling argument that does help aid the battle against slavery. For Olaudah Equiano’s life journey, he expressed an array of cruelties that came with living the life of an African slave; which demonstrates all of the suffering that he endured, then proving how much it can change one’s point of view in life.
I was in complete and utter shock when I began to read Disposable People. The heart-wrenching tale of Seba, a newly freed slave, shook my understanding of people in today’s society, as well as their interactions with each other. I sat in silence as I read Seba’s story. “There they [Seba’s French mistress and husband] stripped me naked, tied my hands behind my back, and began to whip me with a wire attached to a broomstick (Bales 2).” I tried to grasp the magnitude of the situation.
"The Life of Olaudah Equiano” is a captivating story in which Equiano, the author, reflects on his life from becoming a slave to a freeman during the 19th century. Through his experiences and writing, Equiano paints a vivid picture of the atrocities and cruelties of European slavery. Ultimately through his narrative, Equiano intends to persuade his audience, the British government, to abolish the Atlantic slave trade as well as alert them of the harsh treatment of slaves. He successfully accomplishes his goal by subtly making arguments through the use of character, action, and setting.
The narrator’s view changed by the blind man in “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. The narrator had many interpretations of blind people. The narrator assumed blind people wear dark glass which Robert did not have. He thought blind people cannot smoke because they cannot see the smoke. Robert was already smoking cigarettes.
Babo also possesses a black double-consciousness, and realizes the contradiction in white perception and is able to use it to his advantage. In Delano and Babo, Melville presents dual, but not identical, shades of innocence—innocence of knowledge and innocence of action—and argues that innocence is not binary. Innocence of either thought or deed does not mean goodness, because true innocence does not exist.... ... middle of paper ...
In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Amasa Delano is inspired by the sight of the black women and their children on board the San Dominick, and as a result projects his own fantasies and own romantic notions upon them. Delano confines the women to the role of the stereotypical gentle and loving maternal figure. In Delano’s delusions, the black female body becomes a symbol of natural beauty that has a nurturing yet exotic nature. By describing them like animals, he dehumanizes them and casts them out from society. The women, however, are able to escape from Delano’s projections and stereotypes through deception and by their active involvement in the revolt. Babo prevents
When dealing with novella about slaves one would immediately assume that the “other,” hegemony, and silence characters would be the Slaves; Herman Melville creates many scenes in Benito Cereno that leads readers to believe that this is case, but that is not case in the end. The slaves in Benito Cereno often described as animals. Capitan Delano often describes Babo as a loyal dog. Later on Delano describes seeing a mother and her child to: His attention had been drawn to a slumbering negress, partly disclosed through lace-work of some rigging, lying with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock.
In the novel, the author proposes that the African American female slave’s need to overcome three obstacles was what unavoidably separated her from the rest of society; she was black, female, and a slave, in a white male dominating society. The novel “locates black women at the intersection of racial and sexual ideologies and politics (12).” White begins by illustrating the Europeans’ two major stereotypes o...
When he gives his first speech, the narrator is blinded by harsh lights where he is unable to see faces, but rather the crowd as a whole. It is not until the death of a fellow brother and friend that the narrator is able to speak from his heart and sees more than the just the spotlight, but rather “the set faces of individual men and women” and in turn is able to understand why he speaks and to whom he is really speaking to (459). The narrator then begins to see how the Brotherhood suppressed him as a person and that even though the visibility of his voice grew among the people of Harlem, the invisibility of his ideals and traits as an individual became further
For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.
In lines 29 through 34 of the same chapter,
Self-knowledge can only be told by the individual, and therefore brings a quality that no other can bring. Also, at times, works made by outside knowledge may seem incomplete or lacking when compared to works made by self-knowledge simply because each experience is unique. For example, in “The Little Black Boy” the main character seems upset that he is not able to play with the young white boy because of his looks, but his mother comforts him by saying God sees everyone as equal and that when He calls His people to Heaven, color will not be a factor. While this poem aids in the realization that slavery does not agree with Christianity and that it should be abolished, it lacks the personal feel and experiences of a book written with self-knowledge, such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Olaudah describes his journey from being kidnapped and sold into slavery to earning his freedom and later fighting in the anti-slavery movement (Equiano).
In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the author presents an autobiography of his experience as a slave. The book is set during a period when slave trade was rife across the globe (Equiano, 2005). While under the servitude of his owners, Equiano becomes cognizant of the tenets of Christianity and also learns how to write and read as well as marine navigation. Throughout his travels, Equiano witnesses the inhumane treatment that was meted out on slaves. The paper sets out to provide a literary analysis and