As Johnson reads the plot of BB against the grain: that is, as if Claggart were right and Billy were guilty of this willfully mutiny. In my opinion the point of this is to get the readers mind running. Basically having us make assumptions on who did what based off of what occurred at the scene and prior to that. From what I’ve read claggart happens to be playful and he hides his messages behind his playfulness. On the other hand billy stutters,  he has anxiety and it happens to be comical to others and he gets into “petty trouble”. As I continued to read things are said about BB that makes is possible to assume that he did kill Claggart. It was also stated that “Billy Bud kills because he cannot speak”, there’s a few issues billy dealt with such as his anxiety and stuttering issue that was provoke and could’ve led to him killing Claggart. Those few things said above about billy bud makes it equally defensible for him to mutinly kill Claggart. Along with it being said that nothing is truly known about Claggart’s origins, to me it’s a bit confusing and somewhat a battle because all the blame is on Billy bud yet nothing of claggart is known.

1. In her piece Barbara Johnson distinguishes a difference between how the affable character Billy reads things and the way that Claggart reads things. In fact they are on completely different wavelengths when it comes to how they see the world around them, which is one of the many reasons that puts them on opposing sides from one and another. The way that Billy reads is incredibly simplistic, which is what leads to his own downfall. In fact, his reading of things is so simplistic he takes everything to be what it is. He wouldn’t find any deeper meaning in the words that someone says or why they would say. In a sense, Billy views the world in a binary black and white way, where no grey can be found. This lack of nuance on his viewing of the world makes him unable to properly express himself and that leads him to throwing punches as he unable to see why others would perceive him as guilty, since he himself knows that he is not. On the other hand we have Claggart who seems to find a deeper meaning in whatever a person says, which causes him to become a distrustful person. He can’t grasp the thought that someone might simply express themselves the way that they are, and must have a certain ulterior motive, which in turn makes him unable to trust a word that Billy says. Instead, when Billy punches him it just reaffirms his belief that Billy was indeed guilty. The way Jhonson shows this difference is through Saussere’s theory of signifier/signified. Billy is unable to see the distinction between the signifier and the signified. In his mind they are the same thing, and can’t be separated in no sense of the word. A chair is simply a chair for Billy. Claggart on the other side of things is able to make a clear distinction between the signifier and the signified but this leads to him becoming more suspicious of language, since he can see how arbitrary words are. He is able to mold what people say to him into whatever fits best into his view of the language. He can’t trust what people say are what they mean because their words can’t be trusted to signify what their true intentions are. This makes Claggart questioning what the others around truly mean, when they say what they say.