SOURCE: “Billy Budd as Moby Dick: An Alternate Reading,” in Studies in Honor of John Wilcox, edited by A. Dayle Wallace and Woodburn O. Ross, Wayne State University Press, 1958, pp. 157–74.

In the following essay, Wagner traces Melville's thematic development from Moby Dick to Billy Budd.

It seems to me that in Billy Budd Melville continued to ask what he had asked in Moby Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man nearly forty years before: “What is it all about anyway, evil and good and all that?” He tempered the view by eliminating the italics—thus giving the thoughtless the comforting suggestion that he had quieted down.¹ But he enriched his picture of disharmonies in this story by pushing further into why's than ever before. Seventy years of living refined, subtilized, and deepened his speculation. The more than thirty years that followed the publication of his last prose work, three...