The Not-So-Obvious Villain of Melville’s Benito Cereno
After completing Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, many of the reader’s questions and suspicions are finally resolved in the last few pages of this short yet compelling story. There is one, however, that still remains to be a mystery. Who is the villain in this tale? Who is the bad guy? As the deposition so explicitly states, the answer is simple and obvious: Babo, Babo and the rest of the slaves of the revolt that so violently took claim of the San Dominick and forced the Spanish to do as they command. With this accusation, Benito Cereno is able to stand by as the poor, broken captive who is a mere victim to this horrific event.
One must remember, however, that Cereno was taking part and aiding in the act of the slavery, a deplorable act that views and treats human beings as property rather than people. Has time and experience just made us complacent to the act of slavery when it is portrayed within a time period of its own existence? Or can the slaves be justified in the violence that they have committed? In the end, who ends up being the bad guy?
These situations are so hard to judge because we cannot travel through time to experience these events. On one hand, I can understand why we are “complacent” with accepting what happened to these slaves and why they did what they did. It’s easier for people to try and forget the past instead of observing it with scrutiny. But on the other hand, people need to understand why the slaves on that ship did what they did. You as a human being are property, owned by someone who is literally no different from you, which would make any person go mad with revolution. The “bad guy” then is not necessarily someone in particular, but the evils that ensue because of slavery. It was babo acting like a bad guy using subterfuge and basically a coup to control the shit, but it was the sailors putting the slaves there as property as the “bad guy.”
There really is not a single villain in Benito Cereno. This is not a traditional good vs evil story. In a traditional story, Babo’s role would be that of the manipulating villain, but under the context we cannot judge him as such. Obviously, the actions of the slaves are justified under the horrific circumstances. The one pure villain in the story would have been Captain Aranda, as he is only characterized as a cruel, vicious man, but when we enter the story he is already dead and no longer a problem. It’s really hard to classify a character as pathetic as Benito Cereno as a villain. While he was a slaver, he is so inept and constantly fainting that becomes just this ridiculous and easy to manipulate character.
Morality is something that is best displayed in stories as a grey issue, which sadly it is not truly explored as in Benito Cereno. It would be easy to label the rebels as evil and the sailors as good, or easy to call the slave owners monsters and the slaves righteous rebels. While the rebels were right and just in freeing themselves, they have no greater reason than the sailors for taking someone else’s life into their own hands. If there was no other way to free themselves but to kill a few sailors, a case could be made for their actions and the viewing of them as pure heroes, but their vicious backlash against the sailors displays a level of violence that is not warranted by how they killed people seemingly outside of the necessary quantity for their freedom. While those who died undoubtedly had flaws and were practicing an inhumane trade, their blood stains the people who freed themselves. In order to prove themselves better than those who would imprison and enslave them, the slaves ought to have found a way to free themselves without resorting to unnecessary violence, that which goes beyond the point of freeing themselves. In the story their actions are painted in a dark light because of this fact, but if they had simply gone about matters in a different manner they could have been more sympathetic, even beyond the point of sympathy one has for anyone who is a slave.
I think it is the moral ambiguity of this story that makes Benito Cereno worth reading. On the one hand, Aranda, the original slave owner, could be perceived as the origin of evil. I don’t think the villain is a particular person or if this is a story with a villain. The juxtaposition of the riddle like first half of the story and the cruel deposition leave the reader to interpret which version is the true one. I prefer to view the story as one that shows that all men black and white are capable of evil. So Babo is the villain in a traditional sense, but I don’t think that was Meliville’s intention.