Melville’s Masquerade A Study of the Confidence Man in Herman Melville’s Novels and Clarel

It is the purpose of this thesis to analyze Melville’s concept of the confidence man as that concept appears in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade and to trace the concept through the other full-length prose works and Clarel. I have chosen for the sake of clarity to approach the problem more or less deductively, beginning with a detailed analysis of The Confience-Man and the predominant traits and guises of its title character, and proceeding from this analysis to an investigation of the confidence-man theme as it is contained in the other works according to their chronological order. Advisor: James E. Miller, Jr