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 theessential aspect. It may be possible, however, to regard "disguise" or "concealment" as the moreessential one.The "disguise" seems to be composed of various elements both in structure and in substance. Thestructural elements may be those of masquerades, fooleries, and palinodes, which are all traditionalrhetorics for disguise. To these structural ones must be added those of substance, which may beunderstood in terms of fragmentalism or bathos.In the narrative are found three apologias, which not only apologize for the inconsistencies ofbehaviors of characters but also defend them as true reflection of reality or nature. In the lastapologia, the confidence-man is paralleled even to Hamlet, to Don Quixote, and to Miltonu27s Satan,as being the "original" character. This attitude of the author seems to be overlapped with that of aMissouri bachelor, one of the characters, who regards nature as primarily inscrutable. This mayalso qualify the authoru27s point of view as that of mimesis.Melvilleu27s view of nature seems to have undergone a gradual change, from that of a flat denialor doubt to that of a disguised one, as is seen in his own letters, in Hawthorneu27s words, or insuch works as Moby-Dick or The Piazza Tales. This change of view seems to be reflected inthe ethos of disguise in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.The view of Nature found in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade seems to suggestMelvilleu27s distorted view of Typology, one of the orthodox Christian views of Nature, which issaid to have been prevalent among New England Puritans since the seventeenth century.
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