Diogenes in Disguise

Herman Melville's narrative, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (CM), is a convoluted work which defies fundamental conventions of the novel. There is no continuing plot or ensemble of characters to lend it coherence, but only a common setting for a collection of episodes, and even that is in flux. The narrative takes place on April Fool's Day aboard a riverboat, ironically named the Fidèle, which stops periodically for some of its passengers to disembark and for new passengers to board the ship. Although a few figures appear in more than one scene, particularly the enigmatic cosmopolitan, characters enter and leave the narrative in a manner which suggests the flow of passengers entering and leaving the Fidèle. Some characters, like some passengers, stay longer than others, but the composition of the sum is constantly varying. These fluctuations in the novel's cast of characters are further complicated by myriad confidence games, games which depend upon the possibility that someone can pretend to be someone else. This is the confidence man's masquerade, and each episode poses the same problem, namely how to determine if another person is being honest, whether about himself, about someone else, about some merchandise, or about a less tangible commodity such as an ideological position. As countless version of the confidence games are played out before the reader, even narration is rendered suspect: a "stranger" concludes the story that he has finished narrating with the comment, "There, I have done; having given you, not my story, mind, or my thoughts, but another's" (CM 135). Melville's narrative is riddled with such confidence men and a wide variety of confidence games, or at least it appears to be. While duplicity is always suspected, its presence is never confirmed or denied by a character who is free from the taint of that suspicion

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