The Confidence-Man:His Maquerade E-Book

Herman Melville.

• Herausgeber: Herman Melville
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is the ninth book and final novel by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1857. The novel's title refers to its central character, an ambiguous figure who sneaks aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day. This stranger attempts to test the confidence of the passengers, whose varied reactions constitute the bulk of the text. Each person including the reader is forced to confront that in which he places his trust.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."The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.

Leseprobe

The Confidence-Man: his masquerade

by

Herman Melville

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A Mute Goes Aboard a Boat on the Mississippi.

Showing that Many Men have Many Minds.

In which a Variety of Characters Appear.

Renewal of Old Acquaintance.

The Man with the Weed Makes it an Even Question Whether he Be a Great Sage or a Great Simpleton.

At the Outset of which Certain Passengers Prove Deaf to the Call of Charity.

A Gentleman with Gold Sleeve-Buttons.

A Charitable Lady.

Two Business Men Transact a Little Business.

In the Cabin.

Only a Page or So.

Story of the Unfortunate Man, from which May Be Gathered Whether or No he has Been Justly So Entitled.

The Man with the Traveling-Cap Evinces Much Humanity, and in a Way which Would Seem to Show Him to Be One of the Most Logical of Optimists.

Worth the Consideration of Those to Whom it May Prove Worth Considering.

An Old Miser, Upon Suitable Representations, is Prevailed Upon to Venture an Investment.

A Sick Man, After Some Impatience, is Induced to Become a Patient

Towards the End of which the Herb-Doctor Proves Himself a Forgiver of Injuries.

Inquest into the True Character of the Herb-Doctor.

A Soldier of Fortune.

Reappearance of One who May Be Remembered.

A Hard Case.

In the Polite Spirit of the Tusculan Disputations.

In which the Powerful Effect of Natural Scenery is Evinced in the Case of the Missourian, Who, in View of the Region Round-About Cairo, has a Return of His Chilly Fit.

A Philanthropist Undertakes to Convert a Misanthrope, but Does Not Get Beyond Confuting Him.

The Cosmopolitan Makes an Acquaintance.

Containing the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating, According to the Views of One Evidently Not So Prepossessed as Rousseau In Favor of Savages.

Some Account of a Man of Questionable Morality, but Who, Nevertheless, Would Seem Entitled to the Esteem of that Eminent English Moralist who Said he Liked a Good Hater.

Moot Points Touching the Late Colonel John Moredock.

The Boon Companions.

Opening with a Poetical Eulogy of the Press and Continuing with Talk Inspired by the Same.

A Metamorphosis More Surprising than Any in Ovid.

Showing that the Age of Magic and Magicians is Not Yet Over.

Which May Pass for Whatever it May Prove to Be Worth.

In which the Cosmopolitan Tells the Story of the Gentleman Madman.

In which the Cosmopolitan Strikingly Evinces the Artlessness of His Nature.

In which the Cosmopolitan is Accosted by a Mystic, Whereupon Ensues Pretty Much Such Talk as Might Be Expected.

The Mystical Master Introduces the Practical Disciple.

The Disciple Unbends, and Consents to Act a Social Part.

The Hypothetical Friends.

In which the Story of China Aster is at Second-Hand Told by One Who, While Not Disapproving the Moral, Disclaims the Spirit of the Style.

Ending with a Rupture of the Hypothesis.

Upon the Heel of the Last Scene the Cosmopolitan Enters the Barber’s Shop, a Benediction on His Lips.

Very Charming.

In which the Last Three Words of the Last Chapter are Made the Text of Discourse, which Will Be Sure of Receiving More or Less Attention from Those Readers who Do Not Skip it.

The Cosmopolitan Increases in Seriousness.

Chapter 1

A Mute Goes Aboard a Boat on the Mississippi.

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidèle, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain’s office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what purported to be a careful description of his person followed.

As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about the announcement, and among them certain chevaliers, whose eyes, it was plain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight of them from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they were enveloped in some myth; though, during a chance interval, one of these chevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasing from another chevalier, exofficio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popular safe-guards, while another peddler, who was still another versatile chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives of Measan, the bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothers Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River country, in Kentucky — creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same regions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.

Pausing at this spot, the stranger so far succeeded in threading his way, as at last to plant himself just beside the placard, when, producing a small slate and tracing some words upon if, he held it up before him on a level with the placard, so that they who read the one might read the other. The words were these:—

“Charity thinketh no evil.”

As, in gaining his place, some little perseverance, not to say persistence, of a mildly inoffensive sort, had been unavoidable, it was not with the best relish that the crowd regarded his apparent intrusion; and upon a more attentive survey, perceiving no badge of authority about him, but rather something quite the contrary — he being of an aspect so singularly innocent; an aspect too, which they took to be somehow inappropriate to the time and place, and inclining to the notion that his writing was of much the same sort: in short, taking him for some strange kind of simpleton, harmless enough, would he keep to himself, but not wholly unobnoxious as an intruder — they made no scruple to jostle him aside; while one, less kind than the rest, or more of a wag, by an unobserved stroke, dexterously flattened down his fleecy hat upon his head. Without readjusting it, the stranger quietly turned, and writing anew upon the slate, again held it up:—

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind.”

Illy pleased with his pertinacity, as they thought it, the crowd a second time thrust him aside, and not without epithets and some buffets, all of which were unresented. But, as if at last despairing of so difficult an adventure, wherein one, apparently a non-resistant, sought to impose his presence upon fighting characters, the stranger now moved slowly away, yet not before altering his writing to this:—