Benito Cereno Themes

Herman Melville’s 1855 novella Benito Cereno, based on a real-life event, follows Captain Amasa Delano’s discovery of a ship on which a slave revolt has taken place. Through Delano’s confused perspective, Melville shows that prejudice and racist assumptions about the world can blind people to reality. On the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship, Delano meets the captain, Don Benito Cereno, a moody, cryptic character who is always accompanied by his…

Benito Cereno shows that being a moral person requires more effort than simply being kind and compassionate. Beyond individual actions, morality involves recognizing the structures of power and injustice that affect different people unequally. As a respected ship captain, Amasa Delano believes that he is fair and kind because he treats white and black people with equal generosity. However, Delano’s conviction that he is a good person leads him to believe that he is morally…

In Benito Cereno, Melville argues that authority based on hierarchy and order alone will never lead to a stable society. As a respected ship captain, Amasa Delano believes that maintaining discipline should be any leader’s primary concern. However, Delano does not realize that, on the San Dominick and, more generally, in the American slave society he finds himself in, maintaining the status quo involves sustaining a fragile system of oppression in which a large…