Both good and evil lie in human nature. Sometimes evil seems to be good while looking from different perspective, and vice versa. This contrasting relationship between good and evil governs the whole plot of Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno. Even Melville portrays atmosphere, characters and incidents in such a way that can suit his purpose. The following will focus on how evil has been suggested and dramatized in Benito Cereno. The everlasting struggle of appearance versus reality finds a strong place in Melville’s Benito Cereno. Melville dramatizes the theme of evil such a way that the readers often get puzzled thinking of the real characteristics of being evil. In this novella, Melville establishes contrasting forms of innocence. Innocence of mind lacks knowledge of wrongdoing, and, as a result, it may commit and excuse heinous crimes. Innocence of action opines that sometimes a lesser evil can be committed to accomplish a greater good. For example, Captain Delano is too naive to see the slave revolt because he sees the black people as ‘good people’. He even considers Babo as a friend, not a slave: “Don Benito, I envy you such a friend; slave I cannot call him." Babo is innocent of wrongdoing because he realizes that the white people will do further wrong to his fellow slaves unless he revolts. Yet neither party is truly innocent; Captain Delano has no qualms about slave trading while Babo pretends to be a slave to play on Delano’s misconceptions and to manipulate his actions. Thus evil is suggested and dramatized in their individual actions. The atmosphere suggests evil in Benito Cereno. While describing the morning of the sea, Melville says, "The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. 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 gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray 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 appearance of the ship ‘San Dominickâ€