Melville's "foundling, a presumable by-blow": A Reading of the Acts of Open Form in Billy Budd, Sailor

This paper examines multiple implications of the acts of the open form in Billy Budd with attention to the author's preference for open ended process of inquiry and non-foundational impulse toward his own art. Melville's open form is equivalent to non-formist organic form and therefore antithetical to the New Critical concept of organic unity, in that the former emphasizes the multiple endings and the fragmented nature of the text created by growing processes of the narrative while the latter underscores the finalized form in literary texts. For this reason, the open ended form engenders multiple perspectives, and renders the novel functional and performative rather than foundational. Like Billy Budd whose origin is unknown, the text of Billy Budd acts like a literary foundling or by-blow of its author whose self-subverting rhetoric allows the story about the protean character to grow further in the mids and hearts of its readers. Rather than conveying the last word of its author, the novel offers its readers interpretive freedom and interpretive conundrum as well.