“In [Billy Budd] there is a deliberately maintained-balance between a naturalistic and a providential or redemptive view of the fate of the victim-hero Budd” (129).
“Although the hanging of the young Adam-Christ is described in religious terms . . . his inert lifelessness is also emphasized, and his ascension is mechanical and abortive, limited as it is to the height of the ship’s yardarm” (129).
“From Vere’s point of view, however, the avoidance of prolonged suffering and the immediate execution of the innocent youth who has run afoul of a merciless law can be understood to be less a punishment than a boon” (130).
“By suggesting the primacy of the law of the heart while at the same time accepting the destructive law which must be enforced, Vere implicitly acknowledges the bankruptcy of his romantic idealism” (130-31).
“[Vere’s] assertion of the claims of both laws shows the captain to be a relativist, although he cannot be satisfied with anything short of absolutism” (131).
Vere is “a character who, longing for certainty, is inexorably caught in relativistic world” (131).
“euthanasia . . . is equates by Schopenhauer with the Buddhist term Nirvana” (131).
“From the perspective of an ultimate withdrawal, both of these opposed patterns of rationalization of the human predicament—the rational-scientific and the conventionally-religious—seem twin chimeras of what Melville describes as “this incongruous world of ours” in a cancelled note to his original manuscript” (133).