The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

About the book

On an April day aboard the Fidèle, strangers ask one another for confidence in charities, investments, remedies, stories, and human nature. Each encounter alters the meaning of trust: generosity may be admirable or foolish, suspicion prudent or cruel, and a persuasive appearance may conceal another performance. Melville gives the novel much of its movement through conversation rather than a conventional adventure plot. The reader is repeatedly asked to judge speakers without receiving a secure position outside their uncertainty. Satire reaches commerce, religion, optimism, and the literary desire for consistent characters. The book's masquerade is therefore also an experiment in reading, exposing how readily an interpretation depends on the very assurances that another scene may teach us to distrust.

• Trust and suspicion
• Identity as performance
• Commerce and belief

Why read it

For a searching comic experiment that turns the ordinary act of believing another person's story into a philosophical problem.

Novel · English text