Melville makes a number of allusions to Billy’s “function as a sacrificial deliverer,” and often directly compares the novella’s main character to Jesus Christ (Loges 137). The main players in Melville’s retelling are Billy as Jesus Christ, Claggart as Satan, and the Grizzled Man as Judas.

Thus Billy Budd, Sailor is best understood in the allegorical sense, as a novella that retells the story of Christ’s betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection. The dark major theme of Billy Budd, Sailor, is that of sacrifice, specifically, the blood of an innocent shed to atone for the sins of the multitude, much like the biblical story of Jesus Christ. In critic Esther Smith’s words, in Melville’s twilight years, “as the biographical nature of his material gave way to his increasingly painful spiritual struggles, his work grew richer but darker” (Smith 1). Melville’s inability to come to a clear position on religious matters shines in Billy Budd, Sailor, a story which presents the disturbing dilemma of the execution of an innocent man, essentially a victim of envy and gossip, who is brought down by the betrayal of one of his own: a fellow sailor. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other” (Cohen 7). Hawthorne also spoke of Melville’s constant wrestling with religious questions: “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’ but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation…. Melville’s lifelong friend and fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne observed that by the end of Melville’s life he “has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind” (Cohen 7). As an old man, Herman Melville grappled with questions of religion and spirituality, and these questions colored the style of his writing, which became increasingly religiously allegorical in his later years. He had, in fact, published nothing in a decade (Cohen 7). At the time that Herman Melville began writing the novella, the literary relevance of his work, and popular interest in his novels and short stories, was virtually non-existent.

Herman melville sailor