The Ironic Budd: Elements of Sophoclean Tragedy in Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor”
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Employing the three major substances of tragedy (plot, character, and thought) as outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics, this paper analyzes how the imbrications and interactions of these components manifest simultaneously within the general Sophoclean text and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. In tracking each author’s manipulation of their respective substances and identifying how adroitly their works converse amongst themselves across the two-and-a-half millennia that separate them, I conclude that literary tragedy is a commonality which links each globally disparate culture, and its every adherent within, and that archetypal tragic thought, character, and plot are three aspects as endemic to 5th century B.C. literature as they would be twenty-four hundred years later. “The tragic hero’s fate is meted out by a plot whose structure preexists them by millennia; and if a contradictory fluidity resides within rigid structure, in almost symbiotic relation to it, then… as evidenced through the fluidity of plot, recognition, reversal, tragic incidence… we learn that the average Sophoclean work fascinatingly occupies the same region of equivocality as [Budd], while maintaining in itself the reification identified by Aristotle which would be instructed to future students of tragedy and the like down through the ages, past the first millennium A.D., up to the moment Melville first raised his pen—and well afterwards—reconstituting itself sempiternally, cyclically for who-knows how long.”