https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Black_Legend<\/a>). If Melville bought into this way of thinking, it seems likely that he would use the Spaniards, not the African slaves, to symbolize evil. (FWIW, when it came to the treatment of Native Americans and African slaves, Spain was not really any worse than Britain and the other imperial powers.)<\/em><\/p>\nAnyway, let me return to the passage in which the narrator first uses the word \u201cevil\u201d:<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cConsidering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano\u2019s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nOkay, so according to the narrator, Delano has a trustful nature. He is not generally liable to think of people as evil. But given what people are capable of, this trustfulness is pretty dumb.<\/em><\/p>\nMaybe we\u2019re to think that the slaves have been evil by rebelling, and they are guilty of the \u201cmalign evil\u201d mentioned by the narrator. But even if this is the case, it merely tells us that the *narrator* considers the slaves to be evil. It doesn\u2019t mean that Melville thinks so, or that we need to read the story as saying so. Narrators are not always reliable. Lots of writers use what\u2019s called an \u201cunreliable narrator\u201d to tell a story.<\/em><\/p>\nFor your followup. let me ask you about the strangely convoluted way in which the narrator speaks to us in the passage above. The first sentence is a doozy:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\u201cConsidering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano\u2019s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nIt seems to me that, had he wanted to, Melville could have expressed himself much more clearly and directly here. Why not simply write something like this?\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cConsidering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano should have been more suspicious. But he was a very trustful and good-natured man, who, perhaps unwisely, was reluctant to think of others as evil.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nSomething like that. To me the most egregious obfuscation, the most unnecessary complication of the language, in the whole passage is the word \u201cundistrustful.\u201d The two negations, \u201cun\u201d and \u201cdis,\u201d cancel each other out; Melville could have simply used \u201ctrustful,\u201d but he didn\u2019t. Why? It\u2019s almost as if he were *deliberately* trying to make it hard for us to understand what\u2019s going on. Any idea why he might want to do this?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Attached is my short essay for the short story Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. The following is a follow up reply and question to the essay. Please answer the BOLDEN question. Only need about a paragraph or so. I have to admit, I find Yvor Winters\u2019 argument\u2014that the slaves in \u201cBenito Cereno\u201d symbolize evil\u2014hard to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_joinchat":[]},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271046"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityassignments.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}