The tone of Benito Cereno is highly suspenseful, reflecting the strong influence of mystery fiction on Melville’s novella. For much of the novella, there is very little action, but a tense atmosphere nevertheless permeates the story. In the opening scene, for example, the narrator’s description of an ordinary morning off the coast of Chile hints at the dark and shocking events to come:
The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.
Though the scene is “mute and calm,” it is hardly pleasant or tranquil. Instead, the narrator emphasizes the eerie gray color that seems to saturate the environment, from the sky to the “troubled gray fowl” that fly through the “gray vapors” hovering above the surface of the water. Further details add to the suspenseful tone, implying that the apparent peace of the scene is deceptive. The birds, the narrator notes, fly “as swallows over meadows before storms,” and the shadows that darken the environment are described as “foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” Though nothing has actually occurred at this point in the story, and indeed, it is only at the end of the novella that the mystery at the heart of the Spanish ship is revealed, these early scenes build up a clear sense of foreboding and suspense.
