Do you normally choose using your heart and emotion or your head and intellect? In Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Captain Vere rightly chooses using the latter, deciding to obey the rule of law and hang Billy Budd. Drawing from this difficult decision, one critic of this novel, Leon Howard, states that Captain Vere had to “conquer his own best and natural impulse…in order to do that which was right.” By setting aside his gut feelings and honoring the rule of law, Captain Vere shows the accuracy of Howard’s statement.
The grueling mental process Vere goes through in making his final decision to hang Billy shows Vere’s struggle to “conquer his own best and natural impulse”, an impulse imploring him to find his likable foretopman innocent. Upon Claggart’s death, Vere proclaims Claggart was murdered by “an angel of God”(Melville 275). and that this angel “must hang”(Melville 275) for perpetrating this murder. Further complicating his decision process, Vere must consider possible mutiny if the rest of crew hears of Claggart’s death. Urgent to settle this issue before this can occur, “every other consideration”(Melville 277) is “overruled in Captain Vere.”(Melville 277) Thus, Vere immediately calls for Billy’s trial, appointing a drumhead court to perform it. Even in response to his court’s hypothetical question of how they can “adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow-creature innocent before God”(Melville 282), he urges the drumhead…show more content… Vere’s refusal to let his fondness of Billy influence his military duty to execute justice is both commendable and right -- commendable in that Vere overcame his moral reservations in order to perform his military duty and right in that Billy’s murder of Claggart, although accidental and inconsistent with Billy’s unimpeachable nature, required the adequate punishment of hanging according to maritime
