Billy Budd is a typical Melville production--a sea story, the author's favorite genre. It treats rebellion, directs attention to needed reforms (impressment), contains rich historical background, abounds in Christian and mythological allusions, concentrates action on actual incidents, and concerns ordinary sailors. Everywhere the style is unmistakably that of Melville.
Through the use of innumerable literary devices, Melville unified his narrative and gave meaning and order to it. Such devices include irony, symbol, foreshadowing, suspense, biblical and mythological allusion, extended metaphor, rhetorical question, poetic diction, and simile. So extensive is the use of mythic figures, stories, and analogues, that the novel is inevitably interpreted as allegory.
Melville's prose contains the rhythm of poetry. The sentences are long, the chapters short, often producing an impression of completeness. The story develops simply, unhurriedly, yet the action rises to frequent dramatic cataclysms. By making the story short, Melville shows himself as a writer at his deepest and most poetic.
Most of the writing is exposition. The events take place sequentially, but from a retrospective point of view. The sentences, long and somber, are packed — almost too full — with information. The newspaper account about Claggart's death seems realistic, but its distortion of fact reveals society's lack of contact with the world of the seaman. The inclusion of a ballad — not only published in Portsmouth but written by a friend of Billy's, a fellow foretopman — presents an alternate view. The poem is crude, but intimately connected with the fate of an ordinary sailor who is executed, then dumped overboard to spend eternity at the bottom of the ocean.
