This paradoxical development gives rise to a set of ambivalences that leave no further space for the good/evil dichotomy. Yet during the confrontation that follows Claggart's attempt to denounce Billy as a mutineer, it is Billy who, handicapped by his speech impediment, instinctively strikes out and causes Claggart's death. Although capable of an intellectual appreciation of Billy's character, he is determined to destroy him out of an envy that fosters irrational suspiciousness and, as is indirectly suggested, perhaps out of a warped homosexual attraction.
By contrast, Claggart is presented as a case of "natural depravity," a mysterious turpitude in the constitution not of people in general but of a few rare individuals. Innocent to the point of inability to suspect maliciousness in others, he fails to notice Claggart's ill will toward him. Billy is an almost extreme romantic version of the noble savage, with only an occasional speech impediment to remind one of the doctrine of humanity's postlapsarian condition. The bearer of the theme of evil is Claggart, the Bellipotent 's master-of-arms, whose duties at the time were those of a disciplinarian and chief of the ship's secret police. The former is represented by William Budd, an outstandingly handsome and generally beloved young sailor who has been impressed (arbitrarily enlisted) into service on the outward-bound gunship Bellipotent symbolically, the merchantman to which he bids farewell at the beginning of the story is called Rights-of-Man.
The story stages the classical conflict of innocence and evil. The plot of "Billy Budd" is partly reminiscent of the events that took place on the USS Somers in 1842, but Melville set the action on an English man-of-war in 1797, a few months after "the Great Mutiny" at Spithead and the Nore, when British naval authorities had reason to fear the spread of rebelliousness through the fleet engaged in the war with revolutionary France.
Like most of Melville's fiction, the story raises complex issues in which ethics, psychology, and metaphysics shade into one another. Its definitive version was brought out by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Left unfinished at the time of Herman Melville's death, "Billy Budd, Sailor" was discovered and first published in 1924.
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