Melville Beyond Moby-Dick: Bartleby, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Typee

Many readers know Melville only as the author of one enormous whaling novel, and either admire it from a distance or stalled in its chapters on cetology. Neither experience says much about whether you would enjoy his other work, which includes some of the most compact and carefully controlled fiction in American literature.

This guide covers four pieces: two tales from The Piazza Tales, the posthumous novella Billy Budd, and his first book, Typee. Two of them can be read in an evening. It describes openings, narrators, and structure, and leaves the turns of each story alone.

Bartleby: a lawyer’s office on Wall Street

The narrator introduces himself as “a rather elderly man” who has spent thirty years in a safe, unambitious legal practice. He employs copyists whom he calls Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, and describes each of them with the same fond exactness he gives to his office windows. Then he hires a fourth copyist named Bartleby.¹

The story turns on a sentence Bartleby begins to use when asked to do something: “I would prefer not to.” What to notice is not the sentence but the narrator’s response to it. He explains, bargains, rationalizes, and congratulates himself on his patience, and the reader gradually learns more about him than about his clerk. Read this as a portrait of the man telling the story.

Start here if you want to know in one sitting whether Melville’s prose is for you. The tale was first published in 1853 and is included in The Piazza Tales, the 1856 collection available as a single eBook; a standalone Gutenberg edition also exists.

Benito Cereno: a visit to a ship in distress

“In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts,” is at anchor off the coast of Chile when a strange ship drifts into the harbor. He rows over to offer help and spends most of the tale aboard the San Dominick, observing its Spanish captain, Benito Cereno, and the enslaved Africans and sailors who crowd its decks.¹

The story is told in the third person but stays close to Delano’s perceptions, and that closeness is the whole design. He notices a great deal, forms theories, dismisses them, and reassures himself. The reader is given exactly what he is given. A long legal document near the end then presents events in a different form, and comparing the two accounts is part of the reading.

Choose this if you liked the way Bartleby makes the narrator’s assumptions visible and want the same technique applied to a situation with far higher stakes. It is the longest piece in The Piazza Tales, and its subject is slavery; the deposition in particular describes violence in plain terms.

Billy Budd, Foretopman: the 1924 Weaver text

Melville left Billy Budd in manuscript at his death in 1891, and it was first published in 1924, edited by Raymond Weaver, under the title Billy Budd, Foretopman. The Gutenberg eBook reproduces that edition along with a set of shorter prose pieces.² Later scholarly editions, which differ in wording, chapter divisions, and even the name of the ship, are still in copyright, so quotations you meet elsewhere may not match this text exactly.

The novella opens with a preface on the period after the French Revolution and the naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, then introduces the figure of the “Handsome Sailor” before settling on Billy, a young foretopman taken from a merchant ship named the Rights-of-Man into a British warship. The other two figures who matter are the master-at-arms, Claggart, and Captain Vere.

This is the slowest-moving of the four and the most discursive. Melville pauses for whole chapters on character, on naval law, and on the limits of what can be known about another person’s motives. Read it for those pauses rather than against them. It suits a reader who has finished one of the tales above and wants to see the same questions about judgment handled at greater length.

Typee: a first book and a stay in the Marquesas

Published in 1846, Typee is the narrative of a young sailor who deserts a whaling ship at Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands with a shipmate named Toby and ends up living for months in the valley of the Typee people, who call him Tommo. It is based on Melville’s own desertion, though how closely has been debated since it appeared.³

The Gutenberg eBook is the 1892 edition prepared by Arthur Stedman. His introduction explains that passages critical of missionaries, printed in the English first edition, were cut from American editions and have been restored here, apart from a few paragraphs the author himself asked to remove. If you want to compare with another text, that is the difference to look for.

The thirty-four chapters alternate between incident and description: the climb into the island interior, daily life in the valley, food, tattooing, religious observances, and the narrator’s shifting feelings about his hosts and his own position among them. Chapters are short and self-contained, and the appended “Story of Toby” answers a question left open in the main narrative. Choose this if you want Melville as an observant traveler rather than a moralist.

Which piece to open first

A sensible path is Bartleby first, then either Benito Cereno or Typee depending on whether you want tension or breadth, and Billy Budd once you know you want more of Melville’s digressions rather than less.

What to be prepared for

Benito Cereno is a story about a slave ship and includes violence, including in the legal deposition, and it reproduces the racial assumptions of its narrator as part of its method. Billy Budd turns on a capital charge under naval law and includes a flogging witnessed on deck. Typee describes cannibalism as a rumor the narrator fears and uses period terms for Pacific islanders. Bartleby is quiet throughout, but it is not a comedy. None of the four treats these matters lightly, and none spares the reader either.

How to read these on BlueReader

Bartleby and Benito Cereno come together in the EPUB of The Piazza Tales, which also contains “The Encantadas” and three shorter pieces, so one download covers two of the four. Billy Budd and Typee are separate eBooks. Download each EPUB from Gutenberg, upload it to BlueReader, and open it from your bookshelf after server processing.⁴ The tales have no chapter divisions, so a bookmark at a scene change is more useful than the table of contents.

If you are deciding whether Melville’s sea writing is for you at all, the guide to classic adventure novels places sea fiction beside other kinds of journey. For the upload steps, see the browser reading guide and the free EPUB guide.