Melville ::Is It Really Happening::

I enjoyed reading this piece. Though, it was very confusing at first, and I will not deny that after reading it, I looked to Spark Notes for a little clarification; but I still enjoyed it all the same.

In Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, we meet Captain Amasa Delano of Duxbury in the year of 1799. We are told where is traveling from, where is headed, and where he has stopped. In the first scene of the story, there is a figure that is scene Delano, referred to as "her" out in the water. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this is in reference to the ship that is found. The ship that is under the command of a strange man by the name of Don Benito (Benito Cereno).

Once Delano entered the ship, the 2002 movie, "Ghost Ship", came into my mind. From the outside, everything seemed normal. But once the other sailors entered the foreign ship, the ship became a haunted thing. Or as Melville says, "but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal..."

Melville uses his language to tell the reader exactly what he wants the to know and see. Leaving the reader with the exact emotion. Of course, as with any piece of literature, I had questions. But I felt that, even though there is no way of knowing for sure what thought or emotion Melville was going for, at the conclusion of this literature I truly began to think more on the idea that "everything is not as it seems" and there some things that one just cannot explain.