Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Comedy
Confusion, Confusion Everywhere
If bona fide comedies start in a state of darkness or confusion, boarding the ship in The Confidence-Man is a dizzyingly wonderful place to begin. We don't really have a sense of what's what—and most of the characters aren't much better off in that respect.
We're provided with a pretty bleak view of human nature, one in which people are grumpy and just don't seem to trust each other very much—if at all. Having a cast of transient characters who board and disembark the ship at random times makes it difficult to pinpoint a hero.
The shadow of confusion that falls on members of this boat ride on the Mississippi doesn't have a clear source just yet. We have a sneaking suspicion though that it was us all along.
Seeing Through the Smudged Glass
As the various confidence-men meet various saps and cajole them into buying things they don't need, enlightenment isn't aimed at other characters so much as at the reader. We readers are implicated in the long philosophical debates that go on between the countryman, the broker, the cosmopolitan, and the philosopher, and more and more, it seems like it's our own powers of interpretation that are on trial.
How we read a scenario is probably a good indicator of what our own beliefs about human nature are. The text makes the reader a sort of additional silent character whose beliefs matter as much as those of the characters we read about. If comedies attempt to reconcile something that's amiss, this is a big, complicated, take-the-plank-out-of-your-own-eye moment.
We're Not Sure What We See, But We Don't Like It
In a cut-and-dried comedy, by the time the devil had his big reveal, we'd probably have all the answers. Not so with The Confidence-Man. In place of a happily-ever-after, we get the sense that the nightmarish tangle of human misunderstanding will simply continue.
When the cosmopolitan leads the old man to his room and the devilish lamp goes out, leaving all in actual darkness, we're sort of stuck. What was all this for? The answer might be found if we instead ask, "What did we learn?" If the text entertained us and got us to think about our own relationship to other humans, then it did its job. We think. Maybe. Hopefully.