Melville - Benito Cereno

The character of Captain Delano in Benito Cereno is relatively easy to associate with as a reader. He, like the reader, is an outsider to the Spainard's boat, and the thoughts going through the mind of the reader as the story progresses are supposed to be roughly the same as those that are going through Delano's mind. His observations and, almost as importantly, his thoughts are open to the reader, though the story is not exactly told from a first-person perspective. He is at times curious, skeptical, paranoid, satisfied, and mystified by Don Benito's story and the condition of the boat.

At the same time, pieces of information are hinted at by the narrative voice that Delano isn't aware of at the time that they are revealed to the reader. This happens several times early in the story as Delano is boarding the ship. One example is when Babo is first introduced. There is no dialogue, but rather Babo's name is spontaneously and unceremoniously revealed in the middle of a sentence: ". . . it was not without humane satisfaction that Captain Delano witnessed the steady good conduct of Babo." Eventually the story's perspective shifts closer to that of Delano and doesn't just summarize all of the dialogue but writes some of it out explicitly, though it's not an absolute transition.

One part that seemed particularly strange to me was a paragraph of Delano talking to himself, at the top of page 2695, beginning with "What, I, Amasa Delano - Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad . . ." This section is unusual from the start because long blocks of spoken words are so few in the story. At first I wasn't even sure if this was Delano talking to himself, because it seemed so out of place with the rest of the way the novel is written. Also, there are again facts that, instead of being specifically introduced, are just kind of thrown about in the middle of a sentence, such as his nickname and the memories from his childhood. It sounds partly like the reader, or perhaps the narrator, is talking to Delano to try to convince him that he's not in danger. It definitely is in the narrator's best interest for Delano to be calm, because it makes the end of the story that much more surprising.