The Confidence-Man

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is a satirical novel by the American writer Herman Melville, published on April Fools' Day, 1857, and the last novel he published during his lifetime. Set aboard the Mississippi River steamboat Fidele on its journey from St. Louis to New Orleans, also on April Fools' Day, the loosely structured narrative follows a mysterious figure who appears to passengers in a rapid series of different guises, a deaf-mute, a crippled beggar, a coal-company agent, a herb doctor, a cosmopolitan philosopher, each in turn soliciting the passengers' money, charity or trust through elaborate appeals to sympathy, providence or philosophical argument. Rather than following a conventional plot, the novel proceeds as a chain of philosophical dialogues and swindles in which the confidence man, whose true identity and even whether he is a single figure or several remain deliberately ambiguous, probes and exposes the passengers' credulity, selfishness, and thin veneer of Christian charity, satirizing the boosterish optimism, religious hypocrisy and financial speculation of antebellum American society. Poorly received and largely misunderstood on its publication, contributing to Melville's retreat from fiction into decades of relative obscurity as a customs inspector, the novel was rediscovered by critics in the twentieth century and is now widely regarded as a dark, formally radical satire whose bleak ambiguity about human trust anticipates later modernist fiction.