Benito Cereno uses “greyness” throughout the story to establish a mood of uncertainty and expectancy. Grey seems to be an intermediate color, wavering between black and white and ready to shift either way. The sense of idleness it carries calls for something to happen – however, we don’t know what that might be.

The reference is particularly prevalent in the opening third paragraph:

"The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a grey mantle. Flights of troubled grey fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled grey vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come."

The word “grey” appears four times in this passage. First, the passage describes everything to be grey. This muteness and calmness renders the setting into a blank canvas ready to be painted with a story. Next, the sea is likened to lead – a grey liquid. This follows with a reference to the grey sky. Again, this implies something is going to happen because when the sky is that color, we expect it to rain. Grey fowl fly through grey fog and often, a flock flees an area when they sense trouble or ensuing threats. It closes by summing up the significance of grey – that it foreshadows deeper shadows to come.

Grey also becomes important on the San Dominick. There, blacks and whites mix and defy racial barriers. Coincidentally (not really), grey is the color between black and white. Grey, therefore, represents an amalgamation of two races.

Like this dominant color, nothing is clear in Benito Cereno. All through the story, we, like Captain Delano, are not certain of what will happen next.

For once, watching a movie instead of doing my homework earlier today might have proved beneficial.

I think that Goodman Brown and Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate have very similar experiences as the come of age and learn of their society's faults.

First off, both naïve characters come from comparable backgrounds. Although Ben may belong to a modern day, upper class family and Brown to a colonial Puritan society, their lives are based on huge pretensions. Ben’s family appears pleased with their parties, children’s success, new cars, and materialism. Moreover, Goodman Brown insists that his family, a “race of honest men and good Christians since the days of martyrs,” has never interacted with the vice. However, both groups actually have many hidden problems.

Then, the characters meet the devil – or Mrs. Robinson in Ben’s case – who reveals reality. During Ben’s affair, he discovers that his allegedly decent, well-to-do family and their friends and society value something completely superficial. Their happiness grows on the things that do not truly matter. Mrs. Robinson reveals that although she lives an ideal life, with a big house with an affluent husband, she is completely and secretly dissatisfied with her life. The image that she and her peers display is not reflective of their actual feelings – it’s all false. Goodman, too, learns of his family’s affections as the devil recalls helping his grandfather lash “the Quaker women so smartly through the streets of Salem” and supplying wood for his father to “set fire to an Indian Village.” They preach lives of absolution, peace, and dedication to God, yet they act violently and sinfully. Hence, both Ben and Goodman Brown gain insight into the negative aspects of their society.

On the converse, at the end of their journeys, each character reacts differently to their discoveries. Benjamin uses the flaws of his parents and their friends as justification to escape their society. They give him the courage to leave it He turns a negative into a positive as he sheds his ties. Goodman Brown, on the other hand, does not take his findings in the same manner. They actually put a damper on his life. After the Devil leads him to decide that “there is no good on the earth; and sin is but a name; to [the devil] is this world given,” he chooses to reject all of society. Even after his wife tries to kiss him, he looks “sternly and sadly into her face, and [passes] on without a greeting.” He becomes “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not desperate man” with no faith in anything. He no longer trusts the minister and the congregation’s holy psalms sound like “anthems of sin.” His discovery of his corrupt society directs him toward a depressing life.

Judge Meagre is the devil. Only a truly evil, crazed maniac could speak his words. It’s funny, then, that Warren parallels his thoughts with those of the British Empire. In her play The Group, Judge Meagre represents colonial Britain’s mission to oppress and subjugate the world.

Meagre, like the British Empire, is a predator in search of prey. His name alone hints at his character; a meagre is a carnivorous fish which pursues and feeds on shoals of smaller fishes. While the British feed off and maintain rule of the American colonies, they must continually quell any opposition.

Meagre openly avows his resentment towards opposition of authority. He hates “Brutus for his noble stand/ Against the oppressors of his injured country, … leaders of these restless factions,… [and] the people, who, no longer gulled,/ See through the schemes of [his] aspiring clan.” Thus, he does not find it dignified, but rather disgraceful, that one would stand up to injustices. Knowing it necessary to control a people, he repeatedly asserts this tyrannical British idea.

In order to accomplish this task and remain above others, the judge and England must deny their selves of all morals. Meager criticizes Sylla because “his soul is with compassioned moved/ For suffering virtue, wounded and betrayed;/ For freedom hunted down in this fair field.” Instead, he wishes that man might lose all love of equal liberty, utopian dreams, and patriotic virtue and suggests that “We’d smoothly glide on midst of a race of slaves.” Of course this notion makes sense – it is the only way to perpetuate the state of colonies. The people must enjoy or at least accept their repression without protest so that the might Britain to remain in control.

Luckily, history shuts Meagre up. The American little fish end up biting the British sharks. When the colonists as a whole reject tyranny they do exactly what Meagre didn’t want. They are no longer prey.