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The Literary Significance Of Herman Melville’S Benito Cereno: An Analytical Reflection On Benito Cereno As A Fictional Narrative, Dani Kaiser

4997 English: Capstone

In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Captain Amasa Delano discovers a distressed slave ship in need of aid, only to later find out that his perception of the dire situation was completely incorrect. Melville’s novella is derived from Delano’s nonfiction account of the experience, titled Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). This paper focuses on three questions that demonstrate why Melville wrote a novella almost completely derived from a nonfiction account of the events aboard the ship. In order to understand why Melville’s novella is powerful, one must ask, as an overarching question why …