Billy Budd, Sailor 2

Study Guide Questions for Ch. 3-8

If you are looking for the beginning of the study for Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville then you can go HERE for a brief introduction. At the bottom of the introduction you will find the links to each section of the study guide as it becomes available. If you would like to see the growing list of book studies available for free on this site you can go HERE. Enjoy!

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find them in the Text)

Courage, Temperance, Despotism

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. Where was the Bellipotent going at the time Billy joined it?

2. What had knights originally called a “base implement…for weavers too craven to stand up crossing steel with steel in frank fight?” 

3. What did Nelson do just prior to entering the fight at the Battle of Trafalgar?

4. When Nelson was transferred into command of The Theseus, a ship that had taken part in the Great Mutiny, what was it hoped that this would accomplish?

5. What was the general atmosphere of things like “on board the seventy-four in which Billy now swung his hammock?”

6. Why, according to the text, would “scarce anyone…have taken him for a sailor” when they saw Vere in civilian clothing?

7. What would Vere never go to sea without doing first?

8. According to the text, what made Vere’s fellow officers call him “queer” and “pedantic?”

9. What is known versus what is said about John Claggart’s origin?

10. What is said of Claggart’s “immediate subordinates?”

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why is Melville telling us about the mutinies at Spithead and Nore? What effect does this have on the story?

2. What did Melville mean by saying, “If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet?”

3. Melville suggests that Nelson’s death was unnecessary. What might account for Nelson’s actions which led to his death?

4. Is the name “Starry Vere” fitting to the captain? Why or why not?

5. Melville wrote of Vere, “His settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, minds by nature not inferior to his own.” What does Melville mean for us to understand about Vere from this and the surrounding context?

6. What does it mean when the text says, “Once enlisted aboard a King’s ship” men “were as much in sanctuary as the transgressor of the Middle Ages harboring himself under the shadow of the altar?” What importance does this have to the present story?

7. What did Melville mean by saying that the sailor’s verdict concerning John Claggart’s person and character was “made upon rude uncultivated natures whose conceptions of human wickedness were necessarily of the narrowest, limited to ideas of vulgar rascality?”

8. Given what we have learned so far, what do Billy Budd and John Claggart have in common?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. What makes someone a great leader? Is being a “great leader” the same as being a “memorable leader?” Based upon the information supplied in this reading, compare and contrast Sir Horatio Nelson with Captain Vere. What do they have in common and what is different about them? Which do you think is probably a better leader overall and why?

2. So far, in the first two readings, Melville has alluded to the advancement of technology such as switching from wind powered to steam powered ships and also the way gunpowder revolutionized warfare. Is technological progress an unqualified good thing or can it sometimes be detrimental to society? If you think it is always good, how would you respond to those who argue that technology has been used to cause harm? If you think it can sometimes be a bad thing, what criteria do you think should be employed to determine whether society ought to adopt a new technology?

3. Following up on the previous question, is it possible for a society to reject technological advancement or is technological advancement inevitable? Explain and defend your answer.

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Proverbs 25:27 and Proverbs 18:12 and relate them to the present reading.