| Popis: |
Various interpretations have been presented as to The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade. Common among these are those that focus on the ambiguity or obscurity of this work as the essential aspect. It may be possible, however, to regard "disguise" or "concealment" as the more essential one. The "disguise" seems to be composed of various elements both in structure and in substance. The structural elements may be those of masquerades, fooleries, and palinodes, which are all traditional rhetorics for disguise. To these structural ones must be added those of substance, which may be understood in terms of fragmentalism or bathos. In the narrative are found three apologias, which not only apologize for the inconsistencies of behaviors of characters but also defend them as true reflection of reality or nature. In the last apologia, the confidence-man is paralleled even to Hamlet, to Don Quixote, and to Milton's Satan, as being the "original" character. This attitude of the author seems to be overlapped with that of a Missouri bachelor, one of the characters, who regards nature as primarily inscrutable. This may also qualify the author's point of view as that of mimesis. Melville's view of nature seems to have undergone a gradual change, from that of a flat denial or doubt to that of a disguised one, as is seen in his own letters, in Hawthorne's words, or in such works as Moby-Dick or The Piazza Tales. This change of view seems to be reflected in the ethos of disguise in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The view of Nature found in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade seems to suggest Melville's distorted view of Typology, one of the orthodox Christian views of Nature, which is said to have been prevalent among New England Puritans since the seventeenth century. |
