SOURCE: Bell, Michael Davitt. “Melville's Redburn: Initiation and Authority.” New England Quarterly 46, no. 4 (December 1973): 558-72.

In the following essay, Bell examines Melville's treatment of initiation into the adult world as less involved in problems of innocence or good vs. evil than most critics assume; Bell's criticism is more concerned with the social and psychological implications of the transformation from naïve child to experienced adult.

Recent criticism of Melville's Redburn, when it has not been simply concerned with gauging the achievement of the novel, has involved itself in a debate which illuminates not only Redburn but also certain general and almost unconscious tendencies in American literary criticism. On the one hand, there are those who agree with Newton Arvin's “mythic” reading of Redburn, which asserts that its “inward subject is the initiation of innocence into evil.” On the other, there are those critics, represented by James Schroeter, who...