While I will be addressing one of Melville’s poems in a big way next week, that still leaves a lot undiscussed, not least of which is Battle-Pieces, and Aspects of the War. Amateur Reader wrote about it earlier in the week (along with other Melville poetry). I still have not finished the collection, and [...]

Moby-Dick is well known for its many doubles, but they’re elsewhere as well; twinning things seems to have been almost unavoidable for Melville. The major twin in The Confidence-Man is confidence and distrust. Everything comes down to confidence or distrust. Whether passengers give to a beggar is a sign of whether they have confidence [...]

Interpolated in The Confidence-Man are three chapters where the narrator steps back from the riverboat to expound on theories of writing fiction. These are, of course, for the Melville fanatic, an irresistible glimpse into his thoughts about writing, and a much better one than we get in Pierre, which is too full of bile [...]

Melville’s prose is always a sight to see, and readers used to his “spiky writerly thrill[s]” should find new excitement in The Confidence-Man on this point. I’ll take a sentence almost at random—a random one I marked, at any rate, but not marked for this purpose. A mute holds a slate on which he [...]

The Confidence-Man was Melville’s first published novel-length work after Pierre, and like in Pierre we get a new setting. We’re on the water again, but this time on a Mississippi riverboat, headed down from St. Louis to New Orleans. The novel is most briefly and most often described as a series of conversations between [...]