The ConfidenceMan Author:Herman Melville Like Moby Dick, The Confidence-Man takes place aboard a ship--but one far different from the whaler Pequod. Its setting is a Mississippi steamboat, the Fidele; and its protagonist, the mysterious Confidence Man, is on a voyage after human prey. He is a man of many guises, but a single role: in a complex series of impostures, this ever-ambiguou... more »s figure relentlessly strips away, one by one, the hypocritical pretenses of his fellow passengers. Charged with savage irony and black humor, the novel is merciless as a depiction of greed and selfishness, of a dark and wolfish world. It represents one of Melville's great later achievements, a roman noir that gives final expression to an intense and turtured vision of the human condition. :It is," as R.W.B. Lewis declares, "the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of...Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, Faulkner's The Hamlet, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and William Gaddis' Recognitions. Melville bequeathed...the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters..."« less