The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) is a comedy of masquerades and a blend of allegory, cultural satire, and metaphysics. The book portrays a confidence man who sneaks on board a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day, and sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. He rapidly assumes various guises and the pleasure of trickery seems more important than the monetary gain. Each person is forced to confront that in which they believe.

The text includes satires of 19th-century literary figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, while exploring themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many literary critics place The Confidence-Man on a par Melville's Moby Dick and Bartleby, the Scrivener as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with existentialism, nihilism, and the absurd.