What seem to be some of the purposes of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno?

The purposes of Herman Melville’s short novel Benito
Cereno have been interpreted in a number of ways, including the
following:

• to expose the social, political, economic, and
  especially racial injustices of the era it depicts


• to emphasize
  the theme that appearances are often deceptive


• to emphasize the
  theme of problems in communication


• to emphasize the profoundly
  destructive effects of evil


• to promote a kind of ethical
  relativism by juxtaposing different perspectives on the same characters and
  events


• to suggest that absolute judgments often contradict one
  another


• to emphasize the ironies that often result from
  misperceptions


• to suggest the ambiguous appearances of
  evil


• to satirize American transcendentalism, especially its
  naivety


• to condemn the shortcomings of
  religion


• to suggest the ways in which the law can often fail to
  provide justice


• to mock the shallowness of naïve liberal-minded
  persons


• to question traditional definitions of the “savage” and
  the “civilized”


• to illustrate the injustices of slavery and show
  their possible consequences


• to present the ship as a complicated
  microcosm of society


• to suggest the nature, methods, and limits of
  human knowledge


• to reverse the roles of victimizer and
  victimized


• to imply a philosophical treatment of the problem of
  evil


• to suggest that beneath the orderly forms of civilization
  lies chaos


• to make the reader wonder whether the work is endorsing
  or condemning the rebellion


• to suggest that slavery is a system
  that damages both slave-holders and the enslaved


• to suggest that
  all humans are capable of evil


• to illustrate that evil is often
  successful because it is often deceptive


• to show a black leader
  who is intelligent and courageous


• to show the evils of slavery, no
  matter who is enslaved


• to complicate simple contrasts between
  “good” and “evil”


• to create, in Babo, a character reminiscent of
  Shakespeare’s Iago, as in the following description, which echoes the final scene of Shakepeare’s
  Othello:

readability="10">

Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not
be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak
words.