By reading the end of the story, the author Herman Melville describes Benito Cereno as a hero who has managed to save his life and the lives of some Spanish sailors from the rebelled slaves. We see that Benito Cereno plays a significant role to save his fellow Spanish who survived from the desease and the repression of the slaves. The writer depicts enslavement as something that is normal by expressing his concern about what has happening to the sailors instead condemning the practice of slavery. In the novel, we understand that the goal of the slaves in San Dominic ship was not to kill Benito Cereno and the sailors but to be taken back to Africa, particularly Senegal in order to recover their freedom. On the other hand, slaves were not organized to handle the situation, sometimes they were not respecting the commandment of their leader Babo. At the conclusion, both slaves and Spanish sailors were in a difficult situation to protect their lives but, I found that it is important to sympathize for the slaves who were taken in force from their peaceful family and countries to be treated without no dignity in America. As we know about slavery stories in America, these slaves were exploited in the countryside without no respect, they didn’t have enough food to eat, were subject to be killed at any time and were considered as a property. At some passage of the novel, Captain Delano can be considered as a good person because he ordered to bring water, supplies etc. for the people who were in San Dominic boat and invited Benito Cereno to take coffee with him in his boat. On the other hand, Captain Delano shows the cruelty by ordering to take guns and kill many of slaves in board of San Dominic and finally captured Babo who was found guilty of murder and stealing a ship and was hanged.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.