Billy Budd's Goodbyes To His Fellow Sailor

Billy shows the world that being creative and expressing yourself can lead you to follow your dreams and be happy. The unsuccessful characters in the visual text were Jacky (father) and Tony (brother). The town expects men to be masculine and miners. Jacky was unsuccessful as he had stood up for himself and the miners’ strike yet lost the battle to the government. He ended up where he started so his efforts towards the miners’ strike

Billy did not act in a trustworthy manner. Billy recently arrived on Vere's ship. Vere was suspicious and unfamiliar with Billy, but he knew and trusted Claggart. Vere needed to be very

The trauma Billy has experienced is shown in an absurd light. He believes himself to be time traveling. He believes that he has been abducted by aliens who look like toilet plungers, and that they are keeping him in a

During the war, many Vets were exposed to a lot of stress, confusion, anxiety, pain, and hatred. Many killed children for the sake of winning the war, which many Vets felt like criminals. When the vets were sent back home with no readjustment to the lifestyle nor deprogramming of what was learned from the military. Having the mentality of psychopathic killer with no morals or control over aggression. As a result, this terrifying scenarios affected American Veteran having no solution or cure. In the novel, Rosewater and Billy had similar crisis, in which both thought life was meaningless. “Rosewater shot a fourteen year old fireman mistaking me for a German Soldier. Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history”. Billy seems not to ever have a normal timeline where he can explain from a child to a young adult, and so on, but rather have a constant flashbacks from his past coming back to reality to a fictional life. For instance “ A Siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War Three at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon”, the siren was simply a firehouse across the street, which Billy triggered into his past reliving his horrific trauma symptoms of PTSD. Within Billy’s Trauma he is pertuated from his past within any sort of noise, smell, or event. In the train as they travel everyone was exhausted

The events of Kesey’s novel are majorly tragedies, all associated with the arrival of and vital disruption caused by Randle McMurphy; Charles Cheswick’s death, Billy Bibbit’s suicide and McMurphy’s own expiry. Once Cheswick returns to Nurse Ratched’s ward on the day of the swimming trip, he explain that he “did wish something mighta been done”. After, he dives into the water and drown - The reader is left contemplating whether his death was accidental or intentional. The event distinguishes a loss that is somewhat the result of disobedience. Proceeding the party thrown at night, Nurse Ratched explains to Billy that his mother has always been “proud of [his] discretion”. It is after Billy tastes the callous repercussions of rising that he decides it is too overwhelming, and constructs another loss for the men of the ward in their pursuit of liberty. In the final pages of the novel, Chief smothers McMurphy in order to ultimately release him from the rule of Nurse Ratched. The scene portrays McMurphy as the final casualty of the men’s revolution, as Chief ventures towards autonomy - which is finally reachable reality for him. As a result of the novel’s tragic fatalities, constraints are released from those who are left to appreciate

It was very unlike Billy to ever do something so rash; he brought out the best in everyone. Captain Vere felt in his heart that Billy’s actions were a mistake, but he could not be sure. The accusation Claggart made was mutiny, and mutiny was a serious crime. Vere had no proof that Billy was not guilty, so for the safety of himself and his crew, he sacrificed Billy’s life.

The setting is the last decade of the eighteenth century. The British naval warship H.M.S. Bellipotent impresses, or involuntarily recruits, the young sailor Billy Budd, extracting him from duty aboard the Rights-of-Man, a merchant ship. Billy’s commanding officer, Captain Graveling, though reluctant to let one of his best men go, has little choice in the face of the superior ship’s demands.

Billy Budd is responsible for his own death. There are times when taking someone’s life is necessary such as a time of war, but not in a heating argument. Captain Vere, said it best that the crime is what they were worried about, not the case between right and wrong. The crime was murder. Billy was a hard worker who would do his best to help anyone out. However, Billy was not judged on the type of man he was he was judged by the action that had taken place.

With this description, Vonnegut vastly distances Billy from the ideal, strong and mighty image of a soldier, yet Billy is a soldier nonetheless. Not only is this weak and ungracious character fighting and representing the honour of his country but also he is one of the few soldiers who survive the war; he outlives many of the other soldiers that could be considered better suited for war. Furthermore, Vonnegut compares Billy to a filthy flamingo, highlighting the distance that exists between society's soldier ideal, graceful and admirable, and the soldiers' reality, harsh and rampageous. In short, Billy is so far from what is expected that he “shouldn't even be in the Army” (51). However, Billy is not the only soldier in this ludicrous predicament. Vonnegut describes the entire Army as chaotic, confused and ludicrous:

While never a defeatist, Billy merely flows through his disjointed life without much heed to the event at hand. Billy realizes that he holds the power to create his own happiness and satisfaction out of life through appreciation of the present moment rather than contemplate the occurrence of past and future. Vonnegut develops Billy Pilgrim as a unique protagonist as a means of forcing the reader to question the application of free will upon society and gain a new perspective on the beauty of the present.

Billy Budd is neither. He may possess the heart of Christ in that he usually unconditionally loves others, but he lacks "any trace of the wisdom of the serpent." Nor is he "yet quite a dove" (BB 300). If a peacemaker, he is a "fighting peacemaker" (BB 296). He does not, as Christ taught men to do, turn the other cheek to insults. (Unless, of course, he fails to recognize them.) When "the Red Whiskers . . . insultingly [gives] him a dig under the ribs," he hits the man (BB 295). Yet the "Red Whiskers" grows to love Billy nonetheless, probably because the sailor has a harmless heart, if not a harmless arm. Billy is like the Christ Child--loving, innocent, and never maliciously harmful--but he little resembles the mature Man.

Billy is endlessly thrown throughout his timeline; never able to escape the moments of his war experience. It has been postulated that Billy is suffering from combat fatigue or PTSD in this work. As such, with a sleight of thought Billy is whisked away to a traumatic moment in his history. Billy takes a bite of a Three Musketeers Bar and he is in the woods with Roland Weary and the scout duo Roland was trying to morph into a trio. The smell of the rotting corpses days after the bombing of Dresden, described as “mustard gas and roses”, shares a similarity to Billy’s drunken breath. It’s no wonder that “Billy didn’t really like life at all” after the war. He never

In any case, whether it is military duty or moral duty, a life has been taken. Regardless, if John Claggart was known to be a malicious man, a man who initially could not stand Billy Budd, who purposely made false accusations, John didn’t deserve to die. It is understood that Billy was loved by all. Billy was taken back by John’s false accusations that he accidently killed him by striking out by the blow. Therefore, it was difficult to place military duty on a man who was kind by nature. However, Billy knew the military law; a punishment for striking a superior officer is death by hanging. At the end, Captain Veer had to set an example to the rest of the crew, by sentencing Billy to death. It was a hard decision for the Captain to execute.

Few words could change people’s life or stop their devil deeds. In Billy Budd, Billy is an innocent, pure man. He doesn’t perceive the evil feeling of Claggart, Master-at-Arms, toward his innocent nature. When Claggart makes a false assumption on him to captain Vere, Billy gets stammer and isn’t able to use words against Claggart. Billy’s stammer stems from his refusal to use the words, the language which is supposed to bring people together, to reply Claggart’s viciousness.

There are two possible fates we each face in life. We either forget our mistakes or carry them on our shoulders forever. This burden has evolved into a common theme for operas, novels and other pieces of literature. For instance, Benjamin Britten uses this motif as a threshold for his opera Billy Budd. He explores the hunting troubles of captain Edward Fairfax Vere by setting up a narration on retrospect of the hanging of Billy Budd, the handsome sailor . Inspired by Herman Melville’s novel, the opera became well known. In effect, in 1997 John Dexter directed one of the performances in the Metropolitan Opera. The story begins with captain Vere as an old man who narrates in retrospect the story of Billy Budd on his ship the Indomitable. Billy, the handsome sailor, kills the master at arms, Claggart, and is, therefore, condemned to death by law. Vere decides not to influence Billy’s verdict and simply hears out what the other three highly-ranked sailors have to say. Despite the captain being against the ruling, Billy has to be hanged in order to follow the laws and avoid mutiny from the ship’s crew. The narration proceeds with Billy’s waiting for his hanging and the execution itself. By the end of the account, Vere asserts that he has accepted Billy’s death. It can be easy to believe this assumption, but nothing could be further from the truth. Captain Vere has not come to terms with this episode of his life, neither should he.