Purpose of the Deposition in Benito Cereno

When I spoke to a friend about Benito Cereno (“Benito Cereno”? How to categorize it?) before class on Tuesday, I predicted that we would focus our discussion on two things: race, and the story’s end. Not the end in the sense of the climax, but the true end, in which Melville goes to the trouble of including a formal narrative of the events, supposedly written by Benito Cereno, and then a couple final pages back in the perspective of Delano. There must have been a reason Melville included those final pieces, as the rest of the story is so deliberate.

Just as The Scarlet Letter details everything that happened except for the actual moment of adultery, so this story lingers over everything except the actual slave revolt– until the deposition. But even that doesn’t exactly count– it relates the events of the revolt in the most formal of styles, and seems to both reveal everything while also adding very little. Meville (or Delano) offers the deposition in order to “shed light on the preceding narrative” but also notes that the claims were “held dubious for both learned and natural reasons” (1571) before the tribunal halfheartedly accepted them. Here, the Melville pulls an almost Poeian, “Philosophy of Composition” move: he claims to explain all, and yet also indicates some doubt on the part of the story’s characters. And, ultimately, we as readers don’t really need the deposition at all– we can understand from the events of the story what must have taken place, by layering our knowledge of the revolt over the claims Benito Cereno made about his voyage earlier on.

So why include it at all? Part of me wonders whether or not the deposition was the true deposition of the true events on which the story was based– but I assume there would have been a footnote in the anthology to alert the reader of the change in author, if that were the case. Perhaps I’m supposed to wonder that: since this is based on a true story, the style of the deposition does lend a more formal, almost truer feel to the narrative than the surreal, suspicious tone that precedes it. It almost makes it more legitimate.

Or perhaps the deposition demonstrates the true extent to which we as readers, along with Delano, were fooled. As that deception is one of the most significant parts of the story, contrasting the wishy-washiness of Delano with the more factual telling of the deposition reminds us that everything was in front of our eyes the whole time, waiting to be uncovered. Indeed, I had the misfortune of knowing the ending of the story before reading it, so I read through it for the first time understanding exactly how deliberate the writing was. That deliberateness is why I find myself fascinated by the deposition: it’s clear that Melville wrote the story with the utmost care, which means that the deposition is no accident… Although I can’t exactly place my finger on what its purpose is.