Billy Budd By Herman Melville

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In the novella Billy Budd, Melville portrays his characters in such a way as to demonstrate the constant conflict between good and evil in the world. He achieves this by the utilization of Biblical symbolism with all of his characters. Melville portrays Billy as a Christ like figure because Billy was the innocent man that was brought into an evil world (the world of a war ship during those times), full of corruption and later on he had to be sacrificed for the betterment of the many. Melville suggests that Billy’s life is comparable to that of Jesus Christ in several ways. One of the examples that Melville compares young Billy’s life with that of Jesus is when Claggart falsely accuses Billy of organizing a mutiny aboard the Indomitable, just

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