Blog #6

Now that I finished reading “Benito Cereno,” I found it really interesting how Herman Melville speaks about slavery. Through Delano’s eye, we can see that he wants to look at the slaves as normal human beings, which, back in time, was not the case. And I think he achieves it perfectly by making him blind to the real situations and making any event positive and turned with sympathy. During the 3/4 of the text, we feel empathy for the slave whose road went so wrong but still try to help the boat maneuver them far from the world they always knew. He thinks the slaves are not nice due to the scurvy, and the Spanish lost their power due to their sickness. But then the truth appears, and once you discover the violence and the torture that happened, then the empathy turns to Benito.

For me, the text brings two tracks of thought :
The first one: Poor Don Benito, who trusted the slaves to sleep free at night and got mentally torture and sick. The second: poor slaves, they never asked to be put on a boat and carried to a foreign country; they only tried to return to the freedom that has been stolen from them.

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