"Cliff Notes - Billy Budd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Though Melville distorts and changes many facts in order to make it
an exciting book, Typee does give you a pretty good idea of what
happened to Melville after he decided to leave the hardships of
whaling behind by escaping to the island of Nukahiva. He actually
did live for a month as the sole white man in the valley of Taipi-
Vai (his Typee) with a group of people who actually did practice
cannibalism (though not on him!). But despite his deep appreciation
for many aspects of indigenous life and a new awareness of the
corrupting influence of Western civilization, he was not the type to
follow the practices of the indigenous people. When you read Typee,
you feel all the forces that must have been pulling Melville in
different directions: his sensuous delight in the carefree island
life, his urge to return home, his hatred for what the missionaries
were doing to the islanders, and yet his deep commitment to his own
culture.

Typee satisfied the publics interest in exotic places and in the
lives of primitive peoples. The book's success catapulted Melville
into a literary career, and he quickly produced four more novels,
most of which sold well and gave him enough money to support his
wife and growing family. The year 1850 was a watershed in his life:
he moved to a big country house in the Berkshires, befriended the
writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived nearby, and, greatly
influenced by Hawthorne's writing and conversation, forged ahead on
Moby-Dick, his masterpiece. Have you read this epic drama of Captain
Ahab's relentless pursuit of the great white whale, Moby-Dick? It
brings together everything Melville had learned at sea with his most
profound thoughts on human nature and the eternal conflict of good
and evil. You can see in its symbolism, its shipboard setting and
its brooding on man's darker side that Moby-Dick is clearly a
forerunner of Billy Budd.

Yet Billy Budd has a clarity and pure beauty that go beyond the
raging passions of Moby-Dick. It's a short book, and yet it seems to
hold a world of meaning. Melville's last book reflects the wisdom,
and some would say the peace, that the writer attained at the end of
his life. It was his last word and he knew it. He spent three years,
from 1888 to 1891, writing and rewriting Billy Budd so that his
message would achieve its maximum power and simplicity. At
Melville's death, Billy Budd was still in manuscript form. Some
scholars feel that Melville had not completed his work and would
have gone on making changes had he lived. Others believe that Billy
Budd was finished to the author's satisfaction. It was not published
until 1924.

Don't you find something fitting about Melville's return to a
shipboard setting in his final work? His greatest coming-of-age
adventures occurred at sea. He used the sea and ships as setting for
two early novels, Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), as well as
for his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. It is not surprising, then, that the