The Confidence Man

"The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of "Moby-Dick," and was the first to portray that American icon - the con-man. More than just a thief, the con-man uses the victim's own greed (or desperation) to trick or trap the victim into giving the con-man what he wants. * * * Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel's setting), "The Confidence-Man" was Melville's tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays an episodic series of vignettes of various passengers - some dupes, some tricksters - told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans on that day. * * * The novel's title refers to its central character and his equally shifty victims, characters in a satirical allegory that is meant to expose what Melville saw as the smug, mindless materialism of mid-century America - a gullible greedy American public that can be deceived by charlatans with the lure of easy money.
The events take place on a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day, reinforcing Melville's remark (in a letter to his friend Henry Savage) that "all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of a joke." Melville's 1857 black comedy was inspired by the story of a New York City swindler he read about in a newspaper. * * * "The Confidence-Man" uses the Mississippi River as a metaphor for those broader aspects of American and human identity that unify the otherwise disparate characters. Melville also employs the river's fluidity as a reflection and backdrop of the shifting identities of his "confidence man."