HERMAN MELVILLE’S BENITO CERENO AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE SLAVERY IDEOLOGY

Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and the Subversion of the Slavery Ideology. The current paper aims to analyse in Herman Melville’s novella the interplay between the ambiguous narrative voice limited by Amasa Delano’s racially charged perception of events and the auctorial presence in the text. We argue that in Benito Cereno, the writer has constructed a symbolically charged but carefully targeted criticism against the social and moral failure of the slavery system in the U.S.