Insights into Benito Cereno: Trying to Find the Truth in a Crazy World

I finished reading Bonito Cereno by Herman Melville a few weeks ago. This is an amazing story with a lot of imagery and symbolism and it was accompanied a lot of pondering on my part. With this in mind, I thought I'd share some themes that I found (I'm really beginning to enjoy telling you guys about what I've found in literature, I think I might do it after every book if I can). So, without further delay, her are some of the themes I found:

1. Deliberateness

I think I may have just made this word up but what I'm getting at here is this question: How do we know if someone is doing something on purpose? For example, how can we tell if someone is genuinely ignoring us or if we are just reading into the situation and being paranoid. In this story, Capt. Deleno, the protagonist boards a ship in distress, he begins to think that the crew members are sending secret signals and plotting to kill him. In the midst of his suspicions, he often talks himself out of his suspicion by stating that is paranoid to assume that these men are plotting to kill him.

2. Suspicion

It seems to me that this entire story is a test of the reader's trust levels by having a series of extremely suspicious events and a protagonist who wants to retain his excessively idealistic trust in the scenario that Bonito Cereno, the captain of the distressed ship, tells him (In spite of the fact that there are numerous holes in his story). I am a pretty trusting person so I was trusting the account right along with Capt. Deleno...right up until Cereno started asking Deleno a whole bunch of questions about how many men he had and what weapons were on his ship (It's kinda like if you give a man on the street corner some money to help him out and he asks for you phone number, birthday and SSN number, that would creep you out right?). At that point, I became pretty suspicious of the whole situation myself.

3. Power

This story spends a considerable amount of time looking at power dynamics by looking at the topic of slavery. What is most interesting is that the person in this tale who is the most enslaved is probably the last person that you would expect to find as a slave because he doesn't fit the prototypical view that we have of slavery in America in the early 1800's. I think Melville did this for two reasons: the first was to increase empathy for slavery by having the enslaved person be an individual that even a profoundly racist person would feel sympathy for. However, I think another reason for doing this was to widen the scope of the definition of slavery. In this story, the enslaved person is eventually freed from his captivity....that is, freed physically. Although this person has been physically freed, he is still enslaved within his mind. This suggests to me that Melville is discussing forms of slavery that go beyond the physical variety that we see. Perhaps it is possible to find yourself in a state of ideological or social slavery where you feel constrained to voice certain views or behave in a specific way simply because society believes that behaving differently is somehow socially unacceptable.

4. Truth

This whole story can be seen as Capt. Deleno's search for truth in his attempts to discover what is really taking place on board Bonito Cereno's ship. What I find interesting is that we never discover the whole truth of what took place and what we do wind up discovering is reported by voices that we don't entirely trust. At the end of the tale, we are given an official account of what happened on Benito's boat, the problem is that a lot of this account is delivered by Capt. Deleno and based on his bad track record of noticing the truth throughout the story, we cannot really be sure that he knows the whole story. Another problem with this truthful account is that it is missing large chunks, several times it claims to be offering the "highlights" of the events that took place and cuts out things that are deemed "not important". The big problem with this is, if you are trying to discover the whole truth about something, do you really want someone else to decide what is or isn't relevant? Of course not! If you are researching or generally attempting to discover the truth in a situation, you are going to want as much information as possible so as to arrive at an informed decision. In the pursuit of truth, this story ends with the idea that there is still a considerable amount of mystery regarding what actually took place and you probably will never know the entire story.

5. Identity

This story takes a look at the concept of identity by posing this question: How do you know if a person you have just met is behaving unusually? If you have just met them, you don't have a baseline for judging their behaviour and even if you have known them for a while, how can you tell if they are truly behaving as themselves when they are around you and not disguising themselves in some way as part of their social register in a process known as self-othering. In this story, Benito Cereno acts very strangely for a deliberate reason but, because Capt. Deleno doesn't know Cereno, he assumes that Cereno is just a generally bizarre person rather than supposing that Bonito is a person who is not acting like he usually would.

6. Perspective

This story also has some interesting exploration of perspective. Even though this story is written in third person (Which I found somewhat odd considering the fact that most of the Melville I have read is written in first person), we are presented with the rather limited viewpoint of Capt. Deleno as the lense through which events are interpreted. Deleno's understanding of the events that take place would be extremely divergent from Bonito Cereno's knowledge and understanding of the events that take place. When we are presented with the account at the end of the story that claims to retell the events that have taken place, there is a significant perspective of the events that took place that remains silenced throughout this inquiry, in fact, this source isn't consulted and none of the authorities seem to consider the fact that this perspective should be considered.

7. Statement V.S. Action

There is character in this story who at a certain point, refuses to speak and is silently executed (Not for being silent, there is way more to it than that). The rationale that is provided for the silence of this individual is simply the idea that "talk is cheap". If talk is not accompanied by action, it is ultimately ineffective and wasted. It seems to me that this concept may have been addressed to members of the abolitionist movement or other advocacy groups in order to remind them that their movement requires action or it is as good as dead.

I hope you enjoyed reading what I found in Bonito Cereno. You may have noticed that I was somewhat vague at times when it came to describing characters and plot points, this was by design. Bonito Cereno is one of those "Heraclitus"-type books, by this I mean that you cannot step into the same "river" twice. After you have read the ending, it is unlikely that you will be able to read the beginning the same way again, things have changed dramatically and perhaps you have changed as well. If I told you too much, it would be a lot like announcing the perpetrators in a murder mystery and nobody likes that.