The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, or the promise of “something further”

Abstract

In a 2017 interview for The New Yorker, Philip Roth insisted that Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) was the right book to read today and that it was a "darkly pessimistic, daringly innovative novel." 1 It is true that modern critics have welcomed the text's originality and praised its flow of vivid descriptions and dialogues sketching the various characters, which differed considerably from the author's earlier (adventure) novels such as Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) or Moby-Dick (1851).Published purposely on April Fools' Day, the exact day the narrative starts, 2 by Dix, Edwards & Co., the novel did puzzle its contemporary reviewers who perceived it as a sort of practical joke and immediately pointed to its lack of unity 3 and deceiving promise that "something further may follow"(251), 4 making interpretation and progress through the plot all the more difficult for the reader.