Innocent Thinking?

"The narrator suggests that Delano should have been suspicious" (O'Connell 188)
According to part of this article the reader should see Delano as an innocent bystander. I guess the innocence thing makes a little sense. If he was totally fixated on helping this other captain and ship out, he wouldn't really notice the bad things that are going on because his mind was somewhere else. O'Connell continues this good point, "The narrator acknowledges that Delano gets it wrong but he tempts us with an easy explanation, one that still allows us to respond to Delano positvely, even though we know from the beginning that he is missing something crucial" (O'Connell 188). This makes sense. The reader would like Delano less if he obviously knew exactly was going on and chose to do nothing.