Ah, you are a talking man--what I call a wordy man. You talk, talk. - describing The Confidence-Man

I find it helpful to think about the layers of The Confidence-Man.  Not that the layers are so different than in many other novels.  But: when in doubt, break it into pieces.

The surface, the story.  One day on a riverboat descending the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans.  I do not know how far a riverboat moved in a day.  The boat has made it to Cape Girardeau, Missouri near the middle (Ch. 21).

Passengers board and debark along the way.  “As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety” (Ch. 2).  A couple of characters are pulled from the crowd to chat or debate or joke around.  They separate; one vanishes, to be mentioned but never seen again, and is replaced with a new sparring partner.  A dances with B, B with C, C with D, and so on in a round dance, until the middle of the novel when Melville settles on a single person, the Cosmopolitan, who stays on the scene while waltzing with the previously unknown X, Y, and Z until the sun rises on the last page.

The bulk of the book is talk – dialogue, argument, story-telling, palaver.  The proportion of the words enclosed in quotation marks is high.  Many chapters might as well be written as plays, as in some famous chapters of Moby-Dick.  "Ah, you are a talking man--what I call a wordy man.  You talk, talk."  (Ch. 22)  That is the novel’s self-description.

The first great trick of the novel takes place at this level.  It turns out that A, C, E, H, and so on, including the Cosmopolitan, are (probably) the same character, a confidence man who is a master of disguise.  The novel has a puzzle aspect, in that I have to figure out who is an avatar of the confidence man and who is not.  Mostly this is not too hard of a puzzle, although there are a couple of ambiguous cases.

The first and second obstacles are visible at this level: no novelistic characters (meaning, no interiority), and no novelistic plot.

If there is little plot, what is the substitute?  Layer two: satire.  The one day of the novel is April Fool’s Day, and the riverboat is a Ship of Fools, the characters a succession of American and universal types.  Misers, capitalists, snake oil doctors, stock brokers, that sort of thing, along with a few real people – Ralph Waldo Emerson, definitely, as well as a disappointingly bland Henry David Thoreau and a cameo by Edgar Allan Poe.  The satire of characters leads to satire of ideas: transcendentalism, prejudices, Christian hypocrisy.  Men are fools and make for good comedy.

Another obstacle, then: some of this stuff is pretty specific to the period.  Researchers have dug up a lot, bless them.

Layer three is allegorical.  The novel is an expression of Melville’s religious doubts, which are not so much atheism as an anguished protest against God.  The confidence man in all his aspects is the Devil, or perhaps Christ.  The sympathies of the book seem to be, especially by the end, on the Devil’s side, even though he is a fraud.  I remind myself that in Moby-Dick it is mad Ahab who is the agent of Yahweh, while the whale and likely Ishmael are in the service of God’s watery enemy, and who sympathizes with Ahab?  Some of the allegorizing is murky.  Scholars argue about exactly how much of its complexity was meant to be visible to a reader other than, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The fourth layer is artistic.  What is there to the novel besides argument?  This is the hardest one of all.