WK 6 The Confidence Man

I really enjoyed Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. It was interesting to read his different stories on the different shapes that the "Confidence Man" or Con man could take on. It was a very interesting way to get people to see and then laugh at their faults so hopefully they would change them. In The Confidence Man, Melville is basically mocking the people and trying to show them the ridiculousness of their ways so that they will change them. This enlightenment period in which Herman Melville wrote outlined how in America there was a customary desire to see beyond people's general faults and put tremendous confidence in the political system and in America as a place for positive things. Melville shares an idea with Hawthorne that human nature is more complex than the happiness or Utopian notion. Melville's The Confidence Man is very different from many other novels in the sense that it is not a plot or character driven novel at all. Instead each chapter has a new twist and it is a series of philosophical sketches that present a new scenario and a new confidence man. But an interesting question to think about is whether or not Melville expects the reader to see the changes in characters as we would normally see in other novels.