Today's lesson focused on the narrator and narrative technique in the novel. Joshua's homework aptly identified the source of the personal history of the malignant ,Claggart i.e rumor and gossip. From there , I addressed the enigmatic source of the narrator's knowledge of the protagonist ,Billy Budd. We discussed that since the narrator clearly has no personal knowledge of the novel's underlying story perhaps the narrator too solely relies on rumor thus raising the question of whether literary truth can constitute real truth. We discussed how and why the novel would differ if told from the first person point of view i.e .by perhaps a more knowledgable narrator. Last, we explored the narrator's various explanations of the source of Claggart's evil nature.