The Confidence-Man

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"Confidence man" is also another a term for con man.

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of Moby-Dick. Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel's setting), The Confidence-Man was Melville's tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. After the novel's publication, Melville turned from professional writing and became a professional lecturer, mainly addressing his worldwide travels. He continued to write poetry, but published no major prose work after The Confidence-Man.

The novel's title refers to its central character, an ambiguous figure who sneaks aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day. This stranger attempts to test the confidence of the passengers, whose varied reactions constitute the bulk of the text. Since the dialogs require a constant evaluation of the various demands on the interlocutors, the reader is confronted with a thematic apperception test that reveals the hidden motivations behind mankind’s discernments. In this work Melville is at his best illustrating the human masquerade. Each person including the reader is forced to confront that in which he places his trust.

The Confidence-Man uses the Mississippi River as a metaphor for those broader aspects of American and human identity that unify the otherwise disparate characters. Melville also employs the river's fluidity as a reflection and backdrop of the shifting identities of his "confidence man."

The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and a metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. Melville's choice to set the novel on April Fool's Day underlines the work's satirical nature, and potentially reflects Melville's worldview, once expressed in a letter to his friend Henry Savage: "All that happens to a man in this life is only by way of a joke."

External links

[Critical reaction to and a publishing history of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade] from [The Life and Works of Herman Melville]
[Online text of the novel] from the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

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