The Confidence-Man Analysis

Fidèle means "faithful" in French, and that's both appropriate and ironic, because this ship is the scene of many interactions that test one's faith in others. The ship—like any ship of fools—...

Melville's narrator is a tricky devil. Having access to the consciousness of multiple characters gives this narrator a lot of power and allows him (her? it?) to inform our understanding of everyone...

The Confidence-Man tackles a number of philosophies, ranging from those rooted in the classical tradition, like Diogenes's cynicism, to good old American transcendentalism. But this exploration isn...

Just when you think something serious is going to happen, Melville will happily settle on some tongue-in-cheek observation of life's absurdities. Melville uses this quirky tone all the time, even w...

Melville is totally playing with his readers, on multiple levels. Not only are we left to contend with crazy content, but the text itself also demands that we engage in some serious mental acrobati...

What even is a confidence-man? Glad you asked. Whether playing the short or long con, a confidence-man is someone who tricks you into doing something. More often than not, that something is parting...

When the lights go out at the end of The Confidence-Man, we're left wondering whether the cosmopolitan is taking the old man to his sleeping quarters or whether the old man is headed for his—gulp...

The Confidence-Man is the master of the hard sell. This book doesn't pull any punches when it comes to literary, historical, social, political, and biblical allusions. Melville also pulls out the S...

We arrive on a ship, and the first thing we notice are the crowds. People to the left of us, people to the right—it's a frenzy. It's also exciting, because it looks like there's someone from ever...

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...

The first twenty or so chapters of the novel take us all over the ship. We meet people of various levels of shadiness who ask for money, from the most sympathetic (Guinea) to the least (the herb-do...

Jack Kerouac was way into The Confidence-Man. He couldn't contain his enthusiasm in a 1950 letter to Neal Cassidy, saying, "Melville in Confidence Man is the strangest voice ever heard in America."...

There are some winks to infidelity and persons of ill repute, but you won't get more than a shoulder graze out of this text. There's no sizzle in this quirky foray into the consciousness and confid...

Myth of Manco Capac (1,1)Myth of Endymion (2, 17)Seneca (9, 41)Tacitus (5, 9) (9, 42)Ovid (5, 18)Horace (5, 18)Anacreon (5, 18)Aeschylus (5, 18)Thucydides (5, 18)Juvenal (5, 18)Lucian (5, 18)Medea...