SOURCE: “The Gaze of History in “Benito Cereno,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 171-83.

In the following essay, Pahl explores the ways in which Melville's historical narrative in “Benito Cereno” represents “the illusion of moral truth.”

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 256

Historiography is as much a product of the passion of forgetting as it is the product of the passion of remembering.

—Shoshana Felman, Testimony, p. 214

Throughout the first segment of Melville's “Benito Cereno,” we are as mystified about what is taking place aboard the Spanish cargo ship the San Dominick as is the American captain Amasa Delano, whose dominant perspective we are forced to follow. It is only later, in the legal deposition that constitutes the second segment of the narrative, that...