Comparing Captain Amasa Delano And Don Benito Cereno

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In James H. Kavanaugh’s argument on the duality of Captain Amasa Delano and Don Benito Cereno, he argues that through their names, and their face-to-face confrontations with each other, Cereno acts as a mirror to Delano, and when Cereno doesn’t play the role of Delano’s mirror in power and security, he views Cereno as a threat to his own power. However, Cereno doesn’t play a good mirror for Delano in the first place. Contrary to James Kavanaugh’s argument, Cereno doesn’t play a mirror to Delano in the first place, as their names aren’t similar and they don’t act similarly, and every thought Delano has on Cereno being an evil “plotting against Delano’s own power,” he nearly immediately discredits the thought as paranoia and silliness. Although Kavanaugh argues that Delano and Cereno mirror each other in the text, the two characters clearly do not, even if they are meant to. He claims that the names of the two characters, Amasa Delano and Benito Cereno, are similar, yet that’s simply not true. The two names don’t sound similar except for the “no” sound at the end of each name, and the meanings of the names are not remotely similar. “Amasa” is hebrew, and means hardship or burden. …show more content…

In the shaving scene, when Babo cuts Don Benito, and Captain Delano sees Cereno terrified at the sight of his own blood, he ponders the reality of a man who “can’t endure the sight of one little drop” of his own blood, yet “meant to spill all [Delano’s] blood” (ch 3, pg 4). When Delano sees Cereno after having paranoid thoughts, he discredits his own preconceived notions on Cereno, seeing him to be a different man than feared to be. While it may not be immediate, Delano always disregards his paranoid thoughts on the possibility of Cereno being an evil figure in a plot against Delano’s

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