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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Melville’s style in Benito Cereno is mysterious and gloomy, drawing heavily from the genres of mystery and gothic horror. This aspect of Melville’s style is particularly prominent in his description of the Spanish ship San Dominick and the seemingly bizarre behavior of those onboard. Melville draws from the conventions of the gothic style, with its characteristic focus on old haunted houses and supernatural phenomena, in his description of the ghostly ship that holds a shocking secret:
The tops were [...] all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries, in one of which was seen perched, on a ratlin, a white noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic, somnambulistic character, being frequently caught by hand at sea. Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret, long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay. Toward the stern, two high-raised quarter galleries—the balustrades here and there covered with dry, tindery sea-moss—opening out from the unoccupied state-cabin, whose dead lights, for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and calked.
Here, the Spanish ship is described in the manner of a dilapidated old mansion, with its “battered and mouldy” balustrades that are covered in “sea-moss,” and a “castellated forecastle” (the front part of a ship) that appears to the narrator like an “ancient turret” destroyed at the end of a past battle. Even a bird that rests on the ship, a “white noddy,” is described in a foreboding and gothic manner as a “strange fowl” with a “somnambulistic” character, which suggests that it appears, like the ship’s captain, in a dazed manner reminiscent of a sleep-walker. Melville’s style emphasizes the sense of mystery that surrounds the strange, ruined ship.
