The Dirty Work of a Telltale: Narrative Ethics in Melville's The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Melville's final two works of fiction, The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, narration itself is presented as an ethical act. Drawing primarily on the theory of Emmanuel Levinas, this thesis explores the ethical dynamics of intersubjective narrative exchanges as they are portrayed in these novels. Both novels depict unethical exchanges in which characters attempt to narrate accounts of their interlocutors in such a way as to render the alterity of these others comprehensible. This model of narration is based on an ideological confidence in self-sufficiency that precludes ethical communication. Against this violent mode of narration, Melville's ironic narrative technique in these novels suggests a model of ethical narration that maintains the alterity of the other and appeals for communication with a plurality of other voices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".