During Herman Melville’s time, the ignorance of America were being tested on their beliefs that black people were inferior to white people. In 1855, with the Civil War on the horizon, Melville wrote his suspenseful yet controversial novella, Benito Cereno. He utilizes his power of story-telling through the eyes of the unreliable narrator, Captain Amasa Delano who finds himself onboard a mystifying slave ship that is experiencing distress but fails to realize there has been a slave revolt and the Captain Benito Cereno is being manipulated. Captain Delano is used as a tool in the text as an illustrative young ‘America’ with magnanimous ideals and values about itself: courageousness, nobility, and righteousness. Yet, Delano’s encounter with the ship and its residents reveals the potential ruin of America’s chosen identity: ignorance. As the story is …show more content…
To seize the reader’s attention, Melville uses Delano’s capricious point of view symbolize American hypocrisy of the “myth of a happy slave.” Once the very first page is turned, Melville demonstrates Delano’s personality immediately hinting to the reader how the rest of the story will progress. Delano is a man of “singular undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man,” (Melville 1526). This quote states Delano is not a person of reliability nor does he delve deep into the details of any situation even if the