Melville’s Confidence Man

If any one work of Melville’s has been misunderstood and neglected more than the others, it is The Confidence Man (1857). Usually considered a work of chaotic pessimism, it is in fact one of the subtlest of all satires on the American spirit, a buoyant book despite the cunning with which it examines the national temperament. It is, furthermore, a respectably complete and well-rounded book. One reason for the underestimation of The Confidence Man is the failure to see that it is a book of folklore. The confidence man, a folk figure, is one of the most extraordinary characters in American literature. Melville was aiming very high when he created this character and it has not yet been seen, I believe, how well he succeeded. Earlier, in Moby-Dick, he had achieved the fullness of his lyric-epic comprehension of the American spirit. But his work would have been less complete without The Confidence Man, in which he was able to display a mature satirical intelligence in a style unique among his writings for its leanness, nimbleness, and jaunty vigor.

The action of the book takes place on April Fool’s Day, the day of the American Saturnalia, the festival of the Practical Joke. The scene is a Mississippi river-boat, the Fidèle, bound from St. Louis to New Orleans. The boat is the American world in miniature. The passengers are “parlor-men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, Germans, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth and gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, and quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners; teetotalers and convivialists; deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and Clay-eaters; grinning Negroes and Sioux chiefs as solemn as high priests.” The book is a “masquerade” and the passengers a company of masks, a visionary, shifting, variegated tableau of American life, agitated by the “dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West.”