Benito Cereno Lesson Plan

When Captain Delano considers that Don Benito might be conspiring with the blacks, he dismisses the idea with the thought, “But they were too stupid.” But are these literally Captain Delano’s thoughts? In other words, who exactly is narrating Benito Cereno?

The reader is seeing things from the point of view of Captain Delano, but he is not the narrator. The book employs a third-person narrator—in other words, the narrator appears to be someone like the author himself. The author is omniscient and authoritative, so when we read, “But they were too stupid,” it sounds more factual than if Captain Delano were saying it. After all, this is the same narrator that begins the...