FinalThesis

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities:
Herman Melville’s Denunciation of Truth in Literature
A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of Literature and Languages
Reed College
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Alexandra Wood
May 2015

Approved for the Division
(English)
Pancho Savery

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Pancho Savery, who has continually supported my obsession
with Pierre, and who has demonstrated how to be an effective and thorough scholar of
literature. Without his guidance through this thesis process, and through the English
major generally, Reed would not have been such a rewarding experience.
I would like to thank Marc Amfreville at the Sorbonne for introducing me to
Pierre and the American Gothic. His brilliant master’s class on the genre motivated me to
pursue an English degree, and proved a helpful reference for what a comprehensive study
of literature should be.
I would finally like to thank my wonderful family. Thank you to my grandparents,
who have supported me in achieving all my academic goals, and without whom I would
not hold intellect and hard work so dearly. Most importantly, thank you to my parents,
who have thoughtfully and lovingly guided me through every step of academic success.
Your strength of character, your compassion, and your intelligence have always guided
me through my studies. I am fortunate to have such an incredible support system.
Without you, I would not be here today.

Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Melville’s Distrust in Literature ................................................................. 9
Chapter 2: Melville’s Idiosyncrasies – The Deconstruction of Language and
Narrativity ....................................................................................................................... 23
Language....................................................................................................................... 23
Narrativity..................................................................................................................... 33
Chapter 3: Pierre as Everyman and the Inadequacy of Truth.................................. 45
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 65
Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 71

Abstract
This thesis examines Herman Melville’s Pierre; or The Ambiguities.
Demonstrating Melville’s distrust in literature and his deconstruction of its forms, I argue
that Melville uses Pierre to attack notions of Absolute or Transcendental Truth. I place
myself against the majority of criticism on Pierre, suggesting that it fails to recognize the
deliberate craft of the novel. By examining Melville’s obsession with literary artifice,
plagiarism, language, and narrativity, I suggest that the themes of Melville’s form
correspond to the novelistic project of writing a tragic tale of a stubborn young author. I
argue that form and content, in Pierre, coalesce into a novel deeply conscious of itself
and its significance beyond its pages.

Introduction
Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything
more to do, we have nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our
blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; - I
have heard of Krakens. (Melville, Correspondence 213)
Herman Melville’s publication of Moby-Dick in 1851 resulted in low sales and
scathing reviews. Although his letters did not survive, it appeared that the novel’s only
admirer was Melville’s friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne. After his wildly
successful Typee and Omoo, Melville was shocked by the critical reception. Defeated and
embittered, he set out to write his “Kraken” book, Pierre; or The Ambiguities. And after a
year during which he rarely slept or ate, the book was finished. Despite his high
ambitions to write a novel more profound than any of his others, however, Pierre brought
about the near ruin of Melville’s career.
At the time of its release, Pierre and Melville faced very serious scorn. A
terrifying and licentious tale, Pierre completely appalled its readers. As the reviews
poured forth, Pierre was called “a bad book,” and Melville deemed insane (Peck rpt.
Higgins and Parker 56). In one of the most scathing reviews of Pierre, George
Washington Peck of the American Whig Review argued that the novel served no other
purpose than to shock its audience, and was worth no literary or moral value. On the
contrary, the review implored readers to never pick up the novel, and condemned it most
ferociously. Peck wrote:
When [Melville] dares to outrage every principle of virtue; when he
strikes with an impious, though, happily, weak hand, at the very
foundations of society, we feel it our duty to tear off the veil with
which he has thought to soften the hideous features of the idea, and
warn the public against the reception of such an atrocious doctrine.
(Peck rpt. Higgins and Parker 60)
Peck’s views were not singular; Pierre was commonly condemned as blasphemous. Yet
the immorality of the novel was not the only complaint that surfaced. Critics also homed

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in on Melville’s unusual style, noting in particular his confused narration and
overabundance of neologisms. These effects, critics argued, only added to the
ridiculousness of the novel. The remainder of Melville’s lifetime saw no praise for the
novel. The enmity toward Pierre continued through the rest of the nineteenth century and
through much of the twentieth century.
Not until the 1920s, when the literary world was going through its Melville
Revival, did Pierre gain some praise. During this time, critics moved away from personal
opinions of the novel to literary analysis. These critiques of Pierre were, however, largely
philosophical and did not examine the novel’s literary qualities.
In the 1930s, presumably due to the growing influence of Freud and the
popularity of Lacan, Pierre’s criticism became psychological. Rather than taking the
work as a whole, critics focused on the troubled mind of the protagonist, and attempted
an interpretation of his insecurities and moral deficiencies. This psychological movement
of criticism was, however, most firmly established in 1949 when the psychologist Henry
A. Murray wrote his “Introduction” to a new edition of Pierre. Murray’s analysis did not
merely examine the psyche of the novel’s protagonist, but also that of the author. Murray
equated Pierre with Melville, and argued that Pierre’s progressions and fate were
Melville’s own. He wrote, “With few exceptions, he sides with his hero, seriously
sustaining him even in his most patent self-deceptions. It is evident that Melville’s insight
does not penetrate much further than Pierre’s, or, to put it otherwise, Pierre, in his teens,
becomes as enlightened as Melville in his thirties” (Murray xxi). Though Murray
applauded Melville’s representation of characters with accurate psychological depth, his
association of Melville and Pierre solidified past ideas of Melville’s insanity or depravity.
Murray’s association, furthermore, provided an expert basis upon which later literary
critics could support their claims that Pierre was merely a reflection of Melville’s
psychological unease at the time of writing.
Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins were two such critics. Having written a two-
volume biography of Melville, Parker’s focus was predominantly historical. He and Brian
Higgins wrote several essays in the 1970s that presented theories of Melville’s personal
deterioration during the time of writing Pierre. Their biographical findings were among

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the most influential throughout the entire critical history of Pierre. In his 1976 essay
“Why Pierre Went Wrong,” Parker presented the several equivalences between Pierre
and Melville’s own life, asserting that Pierre’s psyche was largely developed from
Melville’s own (as Murray had contended). In particular, he traced the Memnon Stone
back to Melville’s experience at the Balanced Rock in the Berkshire area, upon which he
had inscribed “MEMNON.”
Parker’s most important findings were about Melville’s process of writing Pierre.
Parker found that the novel Melville finished was not the one he originally intended to
write. Within newly discovered correspondence between Melville and his publishers,
Parker discovered that Melville had written two thirds of the novel when he traveled to
New York City to meet with his publishers. At this point, the two thirds he had written
were entirely set in Saddle Meadows and did not include the New York City section.
From this, Parker contended that Melville had originally intended to keep Pierre in
Saddle Meadows for most of the novel and to only write briefly about his time in New
York City. Yet during his time visiting his publishers, Melville experienced a change of
heart. Parker acknowledged that this change could not be decidedly accounted for (as no
existing letters spoke to Melville’s sentiments during or after the voyage), but he believed
Melville had to confront scathing criticism of Moby-Dick while in the city, criticism that
frustrated and discouraged him. When he reached Harpers for negotiations about Pierre,
Melville furthermore discovered that (presumably due to the overwhelmingly negative
criticism of Moby-Dick) he was only allotted 360 pages, which he believed was not
enough to finish the novel.
These two events culminated in rash decisions in Melville’s writing process,
Parker argued. According to Parker, Melville deleted several sections from Saddle
Meadows and expanded the section in New York City. Most importantly, Parker
discovered, Melville wrote the sections on Pierre’s authorship. Parker suggested that
these additions were inspired by Melville’s discouragement with criticism of Moby-Dick.
He wrote, “Whether or not Melville had intended all along to make Pierre turn writer
once he reached the city cannot be established, but he surely had not intended to make
Pierre’s career distortedly mirror whatever the reviewers would be saying about Moby-
Dick through the years and the start of 1852” (Parker 14). In this way, Parker argued,

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Melville used the sections on Pierre’s authorship to criticize his critics. Portraying the
world of criticism in an asinine light, Melville sought revenge on the literary world. What
began as a perfectly planned and bold narration became confused by these interpolated
scenes.
In following years, Parker and Higgins continued to take a biographical approach
to their criticism on Pierre. Their assertions that Melville’s writing process was disturbed
and that Pierre was merely a product of his mental deterioration became the stance of
much future criticism. From this point forward, it was often taken for granted that
Melville’s novel was “unintentional” in its focus on Pierre’s writing career, and on its
ambiguities. In their 1983 essay “Prospects for Criticism on Pierre,” Parker and Higgins
wrote:
Good critics of the future, we dare to hope, will discard the
prevailing assumptions inherited from the New Criticism, so that
they will not automatically feel compelled to define Melville’s
‘intentions’ in Pierre, as if he had a single intention, one ‘pervading
thought that impelled the book,’ but rather will acknowledge and
analyze his dual or multiple intentions which shifted as a result of
the blows dealt to him by his publisher and the reviewers of Moby-
Dick and as a result of other, perhaps still identifiable, forces in his
life. (268 rpt. 2006 Parker Higgins 212)
This challenge was immediately addressed by Paul Lewis in his essay “Melville’s Pierre
and the Psychology of Incongruity.” Lewis’s essay, published in the same year,
condemned the analytical method of these two critics, writing, “Those who argue that
Melville’s despair as a writer around the time when he was working on Pierre forced him
to confuse his own dilemma with that of his protagonist mistake inspiration for obsession,
Melville’s use of his own experiences for a surrender to them” (Lewis 194). This
dialogue between Parker/Higgins and Lewis was at the heart of the struggle with Melville
throughout the history of Pierre’s criticism. Critics were forced to reconcile Melville’s
apparent intentions for Pierre with his failure as an author during the period in which he
wrote the novel.
Today, this dialogue between Parker/Higgins and Lewis is the central concern of
criticism on Pierre, and it is upon this dialogue that this thesis will develop. While
Parker’s findings on the correspondence of the novel with Melville’s life and on

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Melville’s writing process are worthy of consideration, I side with Lewis. Parker cannot
escape his biographical lens in his analysis of Pierre; and as a result, he cannot
acknowledge Melville’s intentionality in the formal and thematic construction of Pierre.
Where Parker sees a novel tainted by its author’s mental depreciation, I see a novel in the
midst of exploring the very essence of literature, and of Truth.
If there is a “problem” with Pierre, it is that it breaks all standard notions of what
a work of literature should do. The novel has an essential quality of multi-voicedness.
There is not one authorial voice that guides it, but several voices in several styles. They
enter the text seemingly at their own will, and exit just as easily. At first glimpse, this
may seem merely the effect of a scattered or schizophrenic mind, yet further examination
of each of these voices demonstrates that they are deliberate representations. In the act of
replicating multiple voices, Melville recreates in one novel the literary, psychological,
and philosophical worlds of his time. Combined with the novel’s quality of
unresolvedness – in its backstory, in Pierre’s fate, and in its philosophies – Melville casts
doubt over the ideas he represents. Pierre is thus a deliberate act of parody. In his parodic
allusions to other literary texts, Melville demonstrates the futility of attempting to capture
universal Truth in writing, and the inherent artifice of literature.
This artifice and melding of voices is most clearly embodied in Melville’s
narrative structure, where he blends his authorial voice with that of the narrator and that
of Pierre-as-author. At moments, each of these voices stands apart from the others; and at
times the voices seem to perfectly coalesce into one statement. Yet for the majority of the
novel, these authorial voices remain ambiguously related, and difficult to distinguish. In
this vague structure, Melville removes any semblance of certainty. The reader remains
unable to locate the “true” voice of the novel, and thus remains lost and uncertain. It is
this uncertainty and confusion that Melville revels in creating.
While they pervade the entire novel, Melville’s deconstructions of literary genre
and narrative structure are not the sole focus of the novel. Melville’s distrust in literature
is merely one aspect of his distrust in Truth. His literary form thus serves as synecdoche
for his larger thematic intentions.

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As Pierre stumbles through the tragedy of his life, he falls into a destructive habit
of only being able to view the world in dichotomies. Whether between Isabel and Lucy,
right and wrong, or Virtue and Vice, Pierre divides his world into inflexible ideals. In
doing so, however, he fails to recognize the inherent ambiguity of his life and of each of
these forms. In Pierre’s belief that these dichotomous relationships will somehow lead
him to Absolute Truth, Melville embodies the unfortunate fate of Truth-seekers. Through
his narrator’s guidance, and through his representations of Transcendentalists, Melville
refutes the popular philosophies of his time that assert that there is an Absolute Truth in
the world. And through his hero’s failed attempts at finding this “Talismanic Secret,”
Melville further represents man’s naiveté in his belief that Truth is somehow
comprehensible.
Denying first his ability to represent Truth in literature, and then the lack of Truth
altogether, Melville writes a novel that goes against all his contemporaries. Yet in
deconstructing the world of literature around him, Melville cannot escape it. He is
equally trapped in the artifice of words representing truths. Perhaps the downfall of the
novel is Melville’s seeming hypocrisy. But perhaps it is Melville’s simultaneous
acceptance of such artifice, and his determination to make it known, that makes Pierre
such a profound (and profoundly misunderstood) work of fiction.
Where existing criticism aptly represents certain elements of Melville’s rejection
of Absolute Truth, it fails to bring Melville’s philosophical themes together with the
novel’s formal elements. And in doing so, it fails to capture the entirety of Melville’s
intentions for the novel. For the purpose of this thesis, I aspire to correct this deficiency
in Pierre’s criticism. Through first examining Melville’s representations of the
fictitiousness of literature in his form, I will then connect this to Melville’s larger
thematic and philosophical intentions. Ultimately, I wish to disprove such critics as
Parker and Higgins, who suggest that Melville’s novel is nothing more than Melville’s
own delusion. I hope to show, through this move from the formal to the thematic, that
Melville utilizes his own insecurities to create a novel with its own message.
The first chapter of this thesis, “Melville’s Distrust in Literature,” will examine
Melville’s refusal of popular literary forms and ideas. Through an analysis of Melville’s

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use of Shakespearean allusions, I will show that he parodically represents the non-
universality of “morals” in works of literature. Then, using the Plinlimmon pamphlet, I
will demonstrate Melville’s rejection of Ralph Waldo Emerson and similar
Transcendentalists.
The second chapter of this thesis, “Melville’s Idiosyncrasies – The
Deconstruction of Language and Narrativity,” will first explore Melville’s deconstruction
of language. In the use of neologisms, and in Isabel’s unusual relationship to language,
Melville illuminates the artifice of language. In the second part of this chapter, I will
analyze Melville’s unique narrative structure. I will argue that his narrator’s unusual
rejection of typical narrative forms creates a work of narrative deconstruction.
Additionally, I will argue that Melville’s melding of narrative voices creates a
destabilizing narrative that rejects the desires of readers to trust in a single voice.
The third and final chapter of this thesis, “Pierre as Everyman and the Inadequacy
of Truth,” will move away from the novel’s formal elements into its plot and themes.
Through an analysis of Pierre’s self-destruction and unfortunate fate, I will demonstrate
Melville’s disavowal of Absolutes. I will furthermore demonstrate that Melville’s
aversion to all philosophies represents his aversion to Truth generally, and the act of
representing Truth.

Chapter 1:
Melville’s Distrust in Literature
By infallible presentiment he saw…that while the countless tribes of
common novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to
complacently clear them up at last…yet the profounder emanations
of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly
known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and
have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipating, and
disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt
intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate. (Melville 141)
For those critics who are eager to place all judgment of Pierre under evidence for
Melville’s supposedly lost and obfuscated mind, the allusive and heavily stylized
character of the novel seems merely symptomatic. Such critics lampoon the novel’s
sentimental dialogue; its obscure philosophical texts; and, most ardently, Pierre’s
authorial attempt. Yet in so doing, they remain blind to the all-consuming intentionality
of Melville’s work. As Paul Lewis notes, they “mistake inspiration for obsession,
Melville’s use of his own experiences for a surrender to them” (Lewis 194). Melville’s
exploration of literary genre and the literary word is no accident, but rather a bold
dismantlement of those forms. Through parody and pastiche, and through the voices of
his two authors, the narrator and Pierre, Melville relentlessly demonstrates that literature
will never arrive at its so sought-after Truth. And in his valiant efforts, Melville (a
postmodernist well before his time) leaves the novel and the reader with no conclusion,
no solution, to his literary woes.
As such, disgruntled critics of Pierre are right to draw parallels between the
author’s discontent with literature and his protagonist’s own struggle, on the condition
that they not stop there. Pierre’s story as author is tightly woven with the narrator’s
authorial voice. “Young America in Literature” commences with the infamous passage,
“I write precisely as I please” (Melville 244). These oddly self-acknowledging words of
the narrator are soon fused with the protagonist’s, for we immediately thereafter learn of

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Pierre’s success as a young writer. “Young America in Literature” thus refers both to
narrator and protagonist, and begs the obvious connection to Melville himself (though
Melville is, by no means, “young”). From this chapter on, Pierre and the narrator together
reflect on their insecurities about writing, and the ambiguities of literature. These
authorial reflections pervade the second half of the novel, becoming its most central
theme.
Pierre’s personal investment in literature is obvious. Not only does Pierre avidly
read books, he uses them as inspiration in his own life and writing. Pierre frequently
espouses the works of Dante and Shakespeare, and often refers back to them as he
struggles to find answers to his predicament. Indeed, it is reading the Inferno and Hamlet
that inspires Pierre to break all connection in Saddle Meadows and run off with his sister
Isabel. His emotions are compromised by each work. Twice, he drops “the fatal volume”
or “the too true volume from his hand” and succumbs to the aimless wandering of his
mind (Melville 168). Pierre finally arrives at an interpretation of the supernatural hold
these two works have over him: “that all meditation is worthless, unless prompt into
action” (Melville 169). Formerly incapable of extending beyond the abyss of his mind, it
is literature that allows Pierre a moment of honest reflection, literature that awakens him.
Yet it is also literature that prevents Pierre from finding his own success. As he
immerses himself into his writing, he finds that the works of other writers, and their
literary traditions, are inescapable. It is these same works he once loved that Pierre now
cannot surpass. Pierre’s novel itself laments its inability to overcome his predecessors.
When the narrator finally allows a glimpse of Pierre’s writing, the reader is immersed in
an endless mise en abyme of authorial insecurity. Pierre writes of his author-hero, “Cast
thy eye in there on Vivia, he, who in the pursuit of the higher health of virtue and Truth,
shows but a pallid cheek! Weigh his heart in thy hand, oh, thou gold-laced virtuoso
Goethe! and tell me whether it does not exceed thy standard weight!” (Melville 303).
Calling out to Goethe to judge Vivia and to relieve him from his artistic inferiority,
Pierre’s writing demonstrates the cycle of plagiarism at work in Pierre. As the author-
hero Vivia tries to plagiarize from Goethe, one level higher, Pierre plagiarizes from his
own experiences to write Vivia; and yet another level above, Melville stands replicating
his own frustration in his protagonist.

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Ultimately, it is Pierre’s plagiarism that destroys him as an author. After months
of excruciating work on his novel, Pierre receives a scathing letter from his publisher.
The letter begins, “SIR: - You are a swindler,” and continues, “you have…filched from
the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire” (Melville 356). Accusing him of copying the
works of well-established authors, the publishers only confirm Pierre’s fear, and the
inevitable inescapability of plagiarism. The letter, given to Pierre in tandem with the
letter from Glen Stanly and Fred Tartan, instigates Pierre’s downfall. He exclaims, “And
thus nailed fast now, do I spit upon it [his novel], and so get the start of the wise world’s
worst abuse of it! Now I go out to meet my fate, walking toward me in the street”
(Melville 357). Unable to rid himself of his literary heritage, Pierre instead obliterates his
genealogical kin by murdering his cousin Glen.
This endless cycle of plagiarism draws attention to what critic Harold Bloom
terms “the anxiety of influence.” Bloom asserts that all poetry (and, by extension,
literature more generally) is derivative. Every author is inevitably influenced by his
predecessors, and in writing, is somehow in the process of responding to them. In this
cycle of derivative literature, Bloom argues, the authors recognize that each work
becomes less and less original, and they become anxious. This anxiety is essential to
Pierre’s insecurity as a writer, and omnipresent in Melville’s writing.
Yet where Pierre feels unable to combat his anxiety, Melville succumbs to it.
Early on, as the narrator recounts the tale of Memnon, he acknowledges that even this
story, which seems to uniquely inspire Pierre, is a part of a literary tradition with its own
predecessors and with its own derivatives. The narrator writes:
For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the
antique world, the Hamletism of three thousand years ago. ‘The
flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance.’ And the English
Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized;
for being but a mortal man Shakespeare had his fathers too.
(Melville 135)
As mortal men, Melville and his narrator thus freely admit their role in literary
borrowings. And, as Pierre torments himself over his desire to be like his literary heroes
and yet unique, the narrator inserts himself into the text and asserts the ridiculousness of
Pierre’s anxiety. He writes:

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The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was
an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man
himself – who according to the Rabbins was also the first author –
not being the original, the only original author being God. Had
Milton’s been the lot of Caspar Hauser, Milton would have been as
vacant as he. For though the naked soul of man doth assuredly
contain one latent element of intellectual productiveness; yet never
was there a child born solely from one parent; the visible world of
experience being that procreative thing which impregnates the
muses; self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodites being but a fable.
(Melville 259)
For the narrator, the anxiety of influence is mere “nonsense” that lesser authors agonize
over (Melville 159). Like all creation, authorship requires more than just the self. The
narrator contends that there is no such thing as self-procreative literature, or literature that
exists in its own bubble. Later, the narrator argues that the “proud man likes to feel
himself in himself, and not by reflection in others” (Melville 261). Melville distances
himself from such pride, humbly submitting himself to the inevitability of influence.
Rather than trying to force distance between himself and those who influence
him, Melville draws attention to the cycle of influence. As critics consistently note,
Pierre is a highly allusive novel. Through its structure, its plot, and its themes, Melville
replicates the literary giants of his time. Among the most prominent of these allusions are
those to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Not only does Pierre turn to the
works of Shakespeare for guidance in his own life, his life becomes, through the careful
manipulation of Melville’s hand, closely entwined with the Shakespearean tragedies.
Melville establishes this trend from the outset of the novel. Before Pierre’s life
begins to take on the forms of Romeo’s and Hamlet’s, Melville foreshadows what is to
come in a conversation between Pierre and his mother over breakfast:
“Pierre – but you are a Romeo, you know, and so for the present I
pass over your nonsense.”
“Romeo! oh, no. I am far from being Romeo – “ sighed Pierre. “I
laugh, but he cried, poor Romeo! alas Romeo! woe is me, Romeo!
he came to a very deplorable end, did Romeo, sister Mary.”
“It was his own fault though.”

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“Poor Romeo!”
“He was disobedient to his parents.”
“Alas Romeo!”
“He married against their particular wishes.”
“Woe is me, Romeo!”
“But you, Pierre, are going to be married before long, I trust, not to a
Capulet, but to one of our own Montagues; and so Romeo’s evil
fortune will hardly be yours. You will be happy.” (Melville 18)
Though Mrs. Glendinning and Pierre speak of Romeo in jest, Melville ironically
foreshadows Pierre’s unfortunate fate. Mrs. Glendinning and Pierre each present their
own perspective of the Shakespearean tragedy. Rather than be swayed by the romance of
Romeo and Juliet, Mrs. Glendinning thinks only of familial disobedience. What she does
not realize is that this same argument becomes her argument for disowning her own son
only days later. Against this tale of disobedience, Pierre weaves his own tale of the tragic
hero. His exclamations begin in joy; but as they go on, they become more and more
somber. Pierre enacts, in between the protestations of his mother, Romeo’s misfortune,
which later becomes his own.
When Mrs. Glendinning tells Pierre that Lucy is his Montague, she establishes the
romantic dichotomy that aligns Romeo and Juliet to Pierre’s romance. If Lucy is a
Montague, the lover accepted by Pierre’s family, Isabel necessarily becomes the Capulet.
And while the relationship between Pierre and Isabel consistently avoids the discussion
of incestuous romance, Pierre’s disavowal of his family in order to marry her directly
corresponds to the marriage of Romeo and Juliet against their families’ will.
Although Melville’s novel does not correspond to every aspect of Shakespeare’s
play, there are several crucial similarities between the two texts that cement their
relationship. The dichotomy between Lucy and Isabel breaks down when they move to
Saddle Meadows, but the two both come to parallel Juliet. It is thus the feud between
Lucy’s family and Pierre that takes over that between him and his mother. The roles of
Tybalt and Paris collapse into that of Glen Stanly. Rivaling him for Lucy’s affection (as

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Paris does), Pierre enacts Romeo and Juliet’s cousinly murder (that of Tybalt). In
recreating this scene, Melville forewarns that Pierre, like Romeo with Juliet, will be
pushed away from Lucy and Isabel.
The last section of the novel delivers Melville’s final allusion to Romeo and
Juliet. Juliet’s final acts divide between Lucy and Isabel. Lucy, distraught from learning
Pierre has committed incest, dies immediately, and it is her body that provokes Pierre’s
suicidal thoughts. Pierre thus commits his ultimate Shakespearean act, drinking the fatal
poison. And, performing Juliet’s last act, Isabel, too, commits suicide. Pierre’s final
premonition as he sarcastically exclaims to his mother, “Woe is me, Romeo!” thus
replicates the final moments of Shakespeare’s play as the Prince laments, “For there
never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (Melville 18;
Shakespeare 5.3 309-310).
Though the double suicide of Pierre and Isabel directly parallels that of Romeo
and Juliet, the numerous parallels to Hamlet are equally obvious throughout the novel. In
his critical essay “An American Hamlet,” F.O. Matthiessen lists the character parallels
between Pierre and Hamlet, and illustrates the glaring intentionality of such parallels.
Matthiessen argues that each character in Pierre has a counterpart in Hamlet, who
demonstrates Shakespeare’s theme of opposed forces, or “contraries. “ He writes:
These are to be traced through nearly all the characters: Lucy’s pale
innocence fails Pierre as Ophelia’s did Hamlet; the well-named
Reverend Mr. Falsgrave’s cushioned voice of worldly policy is not
unlike the platitudinizing of Polonius; Charlie Millthorpe plays a
kind of Horatio; Glen Stanly confronts Pierre’s seemingly mad
violence with the decisiveness of Laertes. (Matthiessen 478)
Thus establishing the character correspondences, Matthiessen argues that “the crucial
relation here as in Hamlet is that of son and mother” (Matthiessen 478). It is necessary to
add to Matthiessen’s claim the equally crucial relationship of father and son. These two
filial relationships run through the entirety of the novel, and bring Melville’s largest
parallel to Shakespeare.
Though for strikingly different reasons, both Pierre and Hamlet are guided by a
desire to uphold their image of their father. Hamlet, once knowledgeable of his father’s
true cause of death, seeks to reestablish his father through revenge. Pierre, though not

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motivated toward revenge, seeks to uphold his father’s untarnished image by withholding
the knowledge of his father’s illegitimate child. In each case, the father’s secret impels
the protagonist forward to his demise. Melville illustrates the importance of this
correspondence in Book IV. As Pierre gazes upon the portrait of his father, it seems to
speak to him, telling Pierre, “I am thy father as he more truly was” (Melville 83). The
chair-portrait urges Pierre to discover the truth of Isabel, and hints at the young
Frenchwoman of his youth. Like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father who reveals the
circumstances of his death, the chair-portrait comes to Pierre and urges him to discover
the truth of his life. With their secrets thus unfolded, each father changes and motivates
the fate of the son.
The parallels between Shakespeare’s plays and Pierre are numerous, but what is
important are not the intricacies of the correspondences, but Melville’s parodic impulse
in creating the allusions. In his allusions to both plays, Melville demonstrates that his
hero, despite his efforts, cannot escape the inevitable tragedy of his fate. And in so doing,
he dismantles the “moral” of each play. When Pierre finds inspiration in Hamlet, he does
so through its moral “that all meditation is worthless, unless it is prompt to action”
(Melville 169). Yet if Romeo and Juliet is to serve any moral, its role in Pierre’s life
should teach him the opposite, that haste and rebellious actions bring disastrous
consequences. Pierre continually follows a pattern of breaking his life into dichotomies,
and believing he must choose between two ideas. His relationship to Shakespeare’s plays
is no different; each tragedy weaving itself into Pierre’s life and prompting him in a
different direction, Pierre must decide between the two morals. Ultimately, it is the words
of Hamlet that inspire him, and in order to live by Shakespeare’s warning, Pierre acts
oppositely of Hamlet. Rather than delay, he acts promptly and decisively, taking Isabel
and Delly away to New York.
While Pierre’s actions counteract those of Hamlet, by following the advice of the
play, he does not escape the final massacre. The moral of Hamlet fails him. In his essay
“The Glendinning Heritage: Melville’s Literary Borrowings in Pierre,” Michael Davitt
Bell argues that Pierre’s fate would not be any less fatal if he follows the moral of Romeo
and Juliet instead. Bell writes, “Both Hamlet’s indecision and Romeo’s haste lead, like
Pierre’s equivocal avowal of Isabel, to bloodbaths. If, as Friar Laurence insists, ‘They

16
stumble that run fast,’ it is also true that they stumble that delay” (Bell 745). Bell’s claim
is clearly evidenced by the ending of the novel. Though both plays end in mass death, the
end of Pierre most closely follows Romeo and Juliet. By evoking the final scenes of this
play, rather than Hamlet, Melville demonstrates that both the fate of Hamlet and the fate
of Pierre are inevitably realized in Pierre. In choosing the moral of one play, Pierre thus
falls into the fate of the other, and Melville implies that the opposite would be equally
true. No matter what Pierre decides, no matter what moral he follows, he cannot escape
the bloodbath.
The inescapability of Pierre’s fate demonstrates the false faith that Pierre places in
these literary morals. Just as Pierre too easily distresses over the influential role of
literature in his authorship, he places too much value in the “Truths” espoused by
literature. Only the narrator can recognize this flaw in Pierre, so warning the reader early
in the novel. Immediately after Pierre’s decision to follow the guidance of Hamlet, the
narrator writes, “He knew not – at least, felt not – then, that Hamlet, though a thing of
life, was, after all, but a thing of breath, evoked by the wanton magic of a creative hand,
and as wantonly dismissed at last into endless halls of hell and night” (Melville 169). As
the narrator articulates, Pierre fails to recognize the unreality of literature. Though it may
provide guidance and inspiration, the narrator informs the reader that it is not real, merely
the passing thoughts of its author. Bell contends, “What Pierre fails to comprehend, and
what the contradiction between Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet makes evident, is the
fictitiousness of literature” (Bell 745). Through his evocation of Shakespearean tragedy
and his subsequent denunciation of it, Melville parodies the works so often held as
exquisite, Truth-telling literature.
The fictitiousness of literature is at the heart of Melville’s literary allusions, and
of Pierre more broadly. In demonstrating both the inescapability of literary influence and
its inherent artifice, Melville calls the entire literary form into question. In response to
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for an American genius comparable to Shakespeare,
Melville incorporates Shakespeare only to destroy the notion of its literary importance
altogether.
In her provocative essay “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” Nina Baym explores
Melville’s lost faith in literature over the course of his career. Baym argues that Melville

17
experiences two essential changes over the course of his career: first, “from entertainer to
truth teller”; and second, “from truth teller to truth denier” (Baym 909). By tracking
significant changes in the thematic elements of Melville’s novels, alongside his reception
history, Baym marks these two transformations as they occur in the texts. Pierre, Baym
argues, produces Melville’s second transformation, “when a domestic romance and
bildungsroman turn[s] into a two-pronged attack on the inadequacies of language for
expressing Truth and on fiction as a mode of discourse entirely unsuited for conveying
language-embodied perceptions and insights” (Baym 909-910). While Baym agrees with
those critics who see Melville’s own life pervading Pierre, she sides with Paul Lewis,
and sees Melville’s own concerns about literature entering the novel deliberately.
Baym’s essay is especially important where it draws a link between Melville and
Emerson. Just as Melville seems to be responding to Emerson’s call for a great American
genius, Baym contends that he is in dialogue with Emerson’s Nature. Melville’s dialogue
with Emerson is perhaps his most brilliant form of parody in Pierre. Much like his
parodies of Shakespeare, Melville begins with a replication of the text, and then subverts
the very meaning of it. In this case, Melville’s replication of Emerson comes in the form
of pastiche.
Along Pierre’s journey from Saddle Meadows to New York, he discovers
crumpled in his hand the philosophical pamphlet of the so-called Plotinus Plinlimmon
entitled “Chronometricals and Horologicals.” The pamphlet distinguishes between two
concepts of time: chronometrical, referring to the Greenwich time that corresponds to
God’s own time; and the horological, terrestrial time that adapts to each region. These
two concepts of time thus embody celestial Truth and its subjective, human forms. The
pamphlet argues that where chronometricals may relate back to God, they cannot be
applicable in the human world. For in the human world, there are local standards and
varied watches. The Time (and Truth) of Heaven, therefore, is impractical on earth, and
man must instead rely on those subjective forms (horologicals) to determine his own
truth. The pamphlet finally contends that chronometricals and horologicals, though they
do not match, are one in the same time. Plinlimmon explains, “It follows not from this,
that God’s Truth is one thing and man’s Truth another; but…by their very contradiction

18
they are made to correspond” (Melville 212). Yet Pierre does not get an explanation for
this final, paradoxical claim, for the pamphlet is cut off.
Plinlimmon’s pamphlet acts as a pastiche of Emerson’s work in several ways. On
a basic level, Plinlimmon’s philosophies are equated to those in similar schools as
Emerson. Later in the novel, Pierre encounters the many philosophers living at the
Church of the Apostles. Among those is Plinlimmon. Though Pierre never specifically
defines him as such, when speaking of the whole of the Apostles, Pierre and his narrator
frequently call them Transcendentalists. As a Transcendentalist himself, and one of the
most famous of his contemporaries, Emerson is thus implicitly linked to Plinlimmon.
Within the narrator’s presentation of the Transcendentalists, he furthermore contends that
they take simple concepts and complicate them. For the narrator, Plinlimmon’s pamphlet
seems both a restatement of a simple problem and a winding text that comes to no
coherent conclusion. In this sense, Plinlimmon’s pamphlet replicates the style the narrator
later defines as Transcendental.
This connection becomes even more explicit in the comparison of Plinlimmon’s
pamphlet to Emerson’s “Language.” In “Language,” Emerson interprets nature as the
language of God. In doing so, he establishes several things. Emerson first claims that
“words are signs of natural facts,” meaning that they proceed directly from nature itself
(Emerson 15). Man thus has a direct connection to God’s language (nature) through his
own. Emerson also contends that these “natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual
facts” (Emerson 15). Natural facts are merely the signifiers for the deeper spiritual Truths
of God. Because of this, nature becomes an “interpreter” for man to converse with, and
understand, God. Man’s access to language is thus proof of God’s existence and man’s
likeness to Him. When taken side-by-side, Plinlimmon’s pamphlet and Emerson’s
“Language” explore the same basic principles. Where Emerson connects Language to
God, Plinlimmon calls Christ the true chronometer and connects him to divine Time. In
each case, there is a direct connection between the earthly phenomena and the divine.
Additionally, in each case, these earthly phenomena stand for something much larger,
Truth. For in his ability to use language to intuit God’s own knowledge, Emerson argues
that man arrives at Truth. In Plinlimmon’s theory of Chronometricals, time-keepers hold
“Heaven’s own Truth” (Melville 211).

19
As Baym notes in her essay, Melville is particularly interested in Emerson’s
philosophies and his book Nature as they relate to literature. Melville, throughout the
course of his literary career, attends several of Emerson’s lectures, and what exists of
Melville’s marginalia today demonstrates his avid reading of Emerson’s texts. In March
of 1849, after listening to Emerson speak, Melville writes to Evert A. Duyckinck, “Say
what they will, he’s a great man” (Melville, Correspondence 119). Yet when Duyckinck
accuses Melville of “oscillat[ing] in Emerson’s rainbow” (referring to a popular cartoon
of Emerson swinging in an inverted rainbow), Melville quickly clarifies his earlier
comment (Duycknick 594). He writes, “I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr.
Emerson”; and contends that though Emerson may be admired for his willingness to dig
deep into philosophical problems, Melville does not admire his Transcendentalist
“gibberish” (Melville, Correspondence 121). Melville’s distrust for and disagreement
with Emerson’s philosophies is even more evident in his marginalia. In his copy of
Emerson’s Essays, Melville writes in the margins, “[Emerson’s] gross and astonishing
errors & illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that at first
one hesitates to call it by its right name. Another species of Mr. Emerson’s errors, or
rather, blindness, proceeds from a defect in the region of the heart” (Melville, “Melville’s
Marginalia” 25). Melville’s dissatisfaction with Emerson seems to proceed from the same
argument of his narrator early in Pierre, that the “proud man likes to feel himself in
himself” (Melville 261). Emerson’s overconfidence in his philosophies, and particularly
his beliefs that he has access to some universal and original knowledge, disrupts all of
Melville’s explorations of the unreliability of intellect and literature.
Emerson thus becomes the subject of Melville’s parody. After creating a pastiche
of Emersonian and Transcendental philosophies, Melville then subverts their very
structure and theories. In an ironic twist, Plinlimmon’s pamphlet is cut off at the phrase,
“Moreover, if – “ (Melville 215). The final word of Pierre’s copy harkens back to the
first, the title of Plinlimmon’s lecture series, “EI” (Melville 210). Meaning “if” in Greek,
Pierre’s copy of the pamphlet, ending and beginning with the same preposition, forms a
never-ending cycle of uncertainty. Circling back to its beginning, the pamphlet never
reaches any conclusions to its paradoxical claims. With its already established form as a

20
pastiche of Transcendentalist and Emersonian thought, Melville rejects the idea that such
philosophical texts can attain any coherent and conclusive Truth.
In addition to this subversion of Transcendentalist/Emersonian philosophy in
form, Melville subverts the very theories of Emerson’s “Language” with Plinlimmon’s
philosophies. Though the two authors make equivalent relationships between Language-
God and Time-Christ, and though they both attempt to discover through these
relationships man’s ability to reach Truth, the two authors reach opposite conclusions. If
anything is to be drawn from Plinlimmon’s pamphlet decisively, it is the theory that “for
the mass of men, the highest abstract heavenly righteousness is not only impossible, but
would be entirely out of place, and positively wrong in a world like this” (Melville 213).
Plinlimmon thus asserts the opposite of Emerson’s claim that nature and language allow
man a connection to the “highest abstract heavenly righteousness.” Melville’s pastiche of
Emerson, therefore, is truly a sardonic parody of his claims. Melville highlights the
ridiculousness of Emersonian theories by displaying that an identical structure of logic
can, equally as easy, produce the exact opposite philosophy.
Melville’s parodies of Emersonian thought are not strictly limited to Plinlimmon’s
pamphlet. Immediately before Pierre discovers the pamphlet in his hand, the narrator
propounds one of his own theories, one that sets the stage for Melville’s pastiche of
“Language” by making the opposite claim of Emerson’s famous essay. The narrator
writes:
All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and
attended by Silence…Silence is the general consecration of the
universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff’s
hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the
most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of
Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God. (Melville 204)
Asserting that silence, not language, is the ultimate voice of God, Melville’s narrator
takes away the possibility of man’s access to God’s language. Silence, being always one
and the same void, cannot be interpreted. Indeed, Pierre later asserts man’s inability to
conceive of Truth in such a void. In discussing Virtue and Vice with Isabel, he says that
they, and he, are all nothing. He tells her, “Look: a nothing is the substance, it casts one
shadow one way, and another the other way; and these two shadows cast from one

21
nothing” (Melville 274). Pierre’s thoughts, related back to Silence, demonstrate that
Silence’s quality of nothingness gives it the consequent quality of untranslatability. Every
silence can be divided into equal and opposing ideas, neither one being true or false, but
always and forever nothing.
Baym’s essay contends that this idea of the absence of Truth, in opposition to an
all-encompassing Truth, is the crucial point of contention between Emerson and Melville
in Pierre. She writes, “The point relevant for Melville is that the meaningfulness of
nature, its function as language, requires the assumption of a prior Absolute. One who is
speaking and writing through it and has decreed its meanings. Remove this speaker and
signaler and, in Emerson’s words, “the world lacks unity, and lies broken in heaps”
(Baym 916). Melville’s narrator directly responds to this assumption of an Absolute later
in the novel. As Pierre sinks into his dream of Enceladus, the narrator writes, “Say what
some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere
supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each
man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mood” (Melville 342).
Here, the narrator’s claim directly contradicts that Emersonian philosophy described by
Baym. Rather than assuming that Nature can interpret the language of God exactly, the
narrator argues that language only provides an alphabet, mere building blocks for
understanding. In his allusion, the narrator takes a similar stance to that of Plinlimmon.
Language, like horological time, is a convention that can only attain a subjective truth for
each individual. Being subjective, language does not, and cannot, attain an Absolute.
Denying the Emersonian need for “unity,” Melville embraces the theory that all men
must use language according to their own “peculiar mood[s].”
Melville’s contention with Emerson is thus a contention with literary tradition
more generally. He opposes not only Emerson’s notion of an Absolute, but also the entire
conceit of literature as a form of conveying universal truths. As Baym so rightly notes,
Pierre is thus Melville’s novel of Truth denial. Parody serves, throughout Pierre, as
Melville’s fondest tool for illustrating this theme. Melville’s parodies arrive at no truth of
their own, but rather a denial of Truth altogether. The failure of his author-hero to write
original truths is a failure not of Pierre himself, but of the conceptions of originality and
Truth more generally. Just as Shakespeare’s morals cannot serve Pierre in his life, any

22
moral or Truth found in one literary work cannot transfer to another. At the heart of
Pierre, such parodies function both within and outside of the story. Melville’s lesson for
his author-hero is also a lesson for himself; literature, even in its profoundest moments,
cannot arrive at an Absolute. And thus, Melville submits himself to subjectivity, accepts
the illusion of Truth in literature, and continues to write according to his maxim, “I write
precisely as I please” (Melville 244).

Chapter 2:
Melville’s Idiosyncrasies – The Deconstruction of
Language and Narrativity
I write precisely as I please. (Melville 244)
Though striking in its authorial assertion alone, Melville’s maxim would not be so
infamous today if it did not so accurately reflect the style of Pierre. Melville moves
beyond a mere distrust of literature. Beyond simply attacking the morals or aspirations of
literature, Melville attacks literature from within. Literature, as conveyed by Melville, is
not purely an artifice in its search for Truth, but also in its form. Melville immerses his
reader in this artifice with his ever-changing, ever-ambiguous, and often playful form. As
it switches back and forth between exaggerated sentimental romance and the purely
philosophic, Melville creates a style that is neither here nor there. Within this constantly
evolving genre, he furthermore deconstructs the very foundations of the novelistic form.
His prose is constantly interrupted by the confused construction of words and the
overabundance of neologisms. Language itself – its usage and the reader’s trust in it –
becomes Melville’s subject of parody throughout the entire work. And as the narrator
uses language, he, too, becomes a subject of Melville’s criticism. In the narrator’s often
confused style, in the presence of multiple voices within the narrator, and in the unusual
triangle created between Melville, narrator, and Pierre, the reader’s trust in an authorial
voice is removed from the novel. With no one authorial voice, all notions of Truth in
fiction begin to crumble into the ambiguities.
Language
Melville’s use of language in Pierre was one of the most ridiculed aspects of the
novel when it was released to the public. In the American Whig Review, George

24
Washington Peck wrote, “Word piles upon word, and syllable heaped upon syllable, until
the tongue grows as bewildered as the mind, and both refuse to perform their offices from
sheer inability to grasp the magnitude of the absurdities” (Peck 447). Continuing through
his review, Peck not only mocked those words and phrases that appeared most ridiculous,
but went through the efforts of cataloguing them. He produced the following table:
Flushfulness, page 7
Patriarchalness, “ 12
Humanness, “ 16
Heroicness, “ do.
Perfectests, “ 41
Imaginariness, “ 193
Insolubleness, “ 188
Recallable, “ 186
Entangledly, “ 262
Intermarryingly, “ 151
Magnifiedly, “ 472
Solidest, “ 193
Uncapitulatable, “ 229
Ladylikeness, “ 235
Electricalness, “ 206
Ardentest, “ 193
Unsystemetizable, “ 191
Youngness, “ 190
Unemigrating, “ 470
Unrunagate, “ do.
Undoffable, “ do. (Peck 448)
Peck was not alone in his hatred of Melville’s unusual style. For readers of his era, Peck’s
table demonstrated nothing more than Melville’s lack of sanity, his absurd and cruel
desire to confound readers, and his absolute disrespect of the English language.
Yet Melville’s use of language is more than simple playfulness or disrespect.
Though his language may break many standard forms of English, it does so

25
systematically and deliberately. In his essay “The Ambiguousnesses: Linguistic Invention
in Pierre,” Howard Faulkner argues that there is a method to Melville’s linguistic
madness. He writes of Pierre’s style, “The pattern is incessant, more than an idiosyncrasy
but rather a suggestive indication of Pierre’s – and the reader’s – disorientation and
potential confusion” (Faulkner 42). In other words, Faulkner contends that confusion is
the goal, not mere haphazard experimentation. Faulkner continues his essay by
cataloguing words such as those listed in Peck’s table under their linguistic
characteristics. Faulkner observes that Melville:
 Prefers –ness to –ity in his nouns. For example: “morbidness,” “immutableness,”
“subtleness,” “exclusiveness,” “enormousness,” “artificialness.”
 Creates adverbs from participles. For example: “confoundedly,” “loungingly,”
“postponedly.”
 “Adds any number of bound morphemes, both suffixes and prefixes, to a base
word to create his own variation” (Faulkner 44). For example:
“impassionedments.”
 Creates new comparatives and superlatives. For example: “profounder,”
“selectest,” “ruggedest,” “ancientest,” etc.
 Converts participles into adverbs with the suffix –ly. For example: “abhoringly,”
“forecastingly,” “concealingly,” “beginningly,” etc.
 Uses nouns as verbs. For example: “the word joyed me” (Melville 123), “I will
not mummy it in a visible memorial” (Melville 197).
 Creates new verbs with the use of suffixes. For example: “inventorize,”
“martyrize,” “Montaignized,” etc.
 Uses nominalization (Faulkner remarks that this is his most frequently used
technique):
 Where the base word is an adjective. For example: “bounteousness,”
“aridness,” “joyfulness,” “heroicness,” “angelicalness,” “nobleness,”
etc.
 Where the base word is a participle, past or present. For example:
“muffledness,” “undauntedness,” “secludedness,” etc.

26
 Where the base word is a gerund. For example: “tinglingness,”
“touchingness,” “charmingness,” etc.
Faulkner’s categorization thoroughly and effectively demonstrates the linguistic variation
at work in Pierre.
After citing these variations, Faulkner asks an important question. He writes,
“Does [Melville] really create a distinction between his forms and the standard ones?”
(Faulkner 147). Faulkner does not directly answer his question, but instead asserts that
Melville “destabilizes our sense of language” (Faulkner 47). He moreover argues that this
destabilization serves to reinforce the thematic elements of the novel. In response to
Faulkner’s question, I contend that Melville does not create a distinction between his
forms and standard ones. He gives preference to neither form, but blends them together
into one single (Melvillian) English. I would furthermore assert that in his destabilization
of language, Melville destabilizes the reader’s entire trust in the literary genre. Melville is
in the process of simultaneously writing two texts. In the first, the readers follow Pierre’s
journey, they empathize with the novel’s characters, and they reflect on the ideas and
events of the novel. In the second text, the readers follow Melville’s process of
articulation and their own process of comprehension.
Through the use of language, these two texts often blend imperceptibly together.
Take, for instance, the use of the word “impassionedments” (Melville 142). The word is
not only unusual, but forces the reader to engage in serious mental activity in order to
grasp its meaning. The reader must first recognize the qualitative noun, then the past
participle, then the new noun, and finally the new noun in its plural form. Faulkner writes
that “The journey the reader must make to follow the formation of this one word
replicates the journey Pierre makes from a simple unfortified passion to something
unfamiliar, complex, temporal” (Faulkner 47). Indeed, the word appears in the novel at
the height of Pierre’s confusion about his sister, when he feels particularly torn by his
immediate love for her, and his sense of duty to his father. As the readers struggle to
understand the word “impassionedments,” they replicate (though to a lesser degree)
Pierre’s struggle to understand his “impassionedments.”
Melville purposefully creates a word that forces his reader to puzzle through it;
yet his intentions are not purely thematic. In the use of the word “impassionedments,” he

27
draws attention to the reader’s linguistic practices. Faulkner describes the word’s
linguistic construction: “Here to the free morpheme, passion, already a noun, he adds the
bound morpheme im- as a prefix, the inflectional morpheme –ed, followed by the
morphological suffix –ment, which he supplements with yet another inflectional
morpheme –s to create what he began with: a noun” (Faulkner 45). Through these absurd
additions, Melville does not change the meaning of the word. He does, however, change
the process by which the reader derives meaning from a word, deconstructing the
semiological process. Melville confuses the relationship between the Saussurian signifier
and signified.
According to Saussure, language is a double entity, composed of the association
between a concept and a sound-image (the psychological imprint of the sound or written
text). Saussure terms the concept the “signified” and the sound-image the “signifier,” and
asserts that the combination of the two creates a “sign.” In Pierre, “impassionedments”
has the same signified as “passions.” Though different signifiers (in their
linguistic/textual composition), they both signify the concept of “senses relating to
physical suffering or pain” or “senses relating to emotional or mental states” (OED
“passion, n.”). For Melville, this is crucial. For while he does not wish to disturb the
meaning itself, he does wish to disturb the process of acquiring meaning. In the case of
“impassionedments,” Melville makes the process of signification more difficult. The
readers must first parse through the many linguistic components of the word before they
can fully comprehend it as a signifier. In this struggle, the immediate association of
signifier and signified is arrested. Language does not operate as easily. Instead, language
returns to an almost primordial existence, before sound-images and concepts are
associated. In Melville’s world, the reader must consciously reconstruct the semiological
system. And in doing so, Melville forces his reader to recognize the arbitrariness of the
semiological system.
This becomes particularly evident in passages such as the end of the fourth
section of Book VI. In one paragraph, Melville employs the following words:
“humanness” (twice), “mercifulness,” “beautifulness,” “immortalness,” “universalness,”
“smilingness,” and his infamous phrase, “the vacant whirlingness of the bewilderingness”
(Melville 122). These final words serve to emphasize their very effect. In his abundance

28
of newly constructed words, Melville creates a paragraph where the reader feels tousled
by language. Yet, as Faulkner seems to suggest, these variations stand on equal footing
with standard forms. In between these –ness adjectives, Melville inserts standard ones:
“tenderness,” “sadness” (twice), “gladness,” “blankness,” and “dimness.” Melville places
emphasis neither on his own forms nor on the standard forms; they thus all become fused
into one common language. The passage undeniably draws attention to its idiosyncratic
language (especially in the last phrase), but it does not explicitly confound the meaning.
While possibly struck by the absurdity of such a construction, no reader could
misinterpret the meaning of words like “beautifulness” or “universalness”; such
constructions hold the same meaning as the standard “beauty” and “universality.”
Contrary to the “impassionedments” example, the signifier itself is not the cause for
confusion, but the rules by which certain signifiers are arbitrarily included, or excluded,
in language. In such a passage, Melville thus subliminally directs the reader to the
ridiculous constructions of language in which one form of –ness adjectives can be
deemed correct, where another form, which makes just as much sense, is deemed
incorrect. In doing so, he proves the claim Saussure later makes that “the linguistic sign is
arbitrary” (Saussure 62).
In addition to his consistent deconstruction of standard linguistic forms, Melville
draws attention to the artificiality of language in the character of Isabel. Throughout the
novel, Melville uses Isabel to portray the unusual qualities of language formation. When
Pierre first meets with Isabel, she recounts to him the story of her childhood. In doing so,
however, she runs into difficulties with her memory. Isabel tells Pierre first of her
childhood among the woods. Her descriptions, and the connection made between her and
Mr. Glendinning’s French lover, insinuate that Isabel’s childhood takes place in France.
Later, Isabel remembers traveling on what she believes is a ship. On this ship, Isabel
describes the “pure children’s language” that the other passengers speak (Melville 117).
She tells Pierre:
Now, too, it was that, as it sometimes seems to me, I first and last
chattered in the two childish languages I spoke of a little time ago.
There seemed people about me, some of whom talked one, and some
the other; but I talked both, yet one not so readily as the other; and
but beginningly as it were; still this other was the one which was
gradually displacing the former. (Melville 117)

29
Though unaware of the specifics, Isabel here describes the process of moving from one
speech community to another. In this process, she transitions from bilingualism to
monolingualism. Seemingly as a consequence of her lingual transition, Isabel loses her
memory of what happens before and after this transition. Indeed, the parts of her memory
that are intact center around her language. Melville thus establishes a connection between
Isabel’s loss of language and her loss of memory, thereby asserting language’s
importance in a person’s mental faculties. Where in his odd linguistic inventions he
insists on the importance of consciousness in language, Melville here insists on the
reverse. The two become inextricably linked.
Isabel furthermore demonstrates the subjective experiences of language. After her
story of traveling, she tells Pierre about her new home. She describes the “soul-composed
and bodily-wandering, and strangely demented people” who lived in the house (Melville
120). Her co-habitants, she explains, walk around muttering to themselves, have
outbursts, or silently stare at the floor. She tells Pierre that in this house, she would often
hear “dismal sounds” coming from the basement, and would then watch as coffins came
to the house and emerged from the basement (Melville 119). The scene Isabel describes
is presumably some form of an insane asylum, where the mentally ill live and die. Yet
Isabel can only describe it to Pierre in images, not in words. She tells him, “Thou must,
ere this, have suspected what manner of place this second or third house was, that I then
lived in. But do not speak the word to me. That word has never passed my lips; even
now, when I hear the word, I run from it; when I see it printed in a book, I run from the
book. The word is wholly unendurable to me” (Melville 121). The one word describing
Isabel’s home at the time encapsulates all the trauma of her time there; it holds more
significance than its mere signified. Melville thus depicts the weight of words, the
connotations imbedded in and often indistinguishable from words. Language, he
demonstrates, is not only a form of signification, but a deeply personal part of
consciousness.
Melville additionally characterizes the relativity of language in Isabel’s linguistic
character. Isabel relates to Pierre her memories of Mr. Glendinning and how she
discovered her association to him. At the time, she does not understand her association to
Mr. Glendinning. She simply understands him to be a man who occasionally pays her a

30
visit at her new home. In her second interview with Pierre, she tells him, “I did not then
join in my mind with the word father, all those peculiar associations which the term
ordinarily inspires in children. The word father only seemed a word of general love and
endearment to me – little or nothing more; it did not seem to involve any claims of any
sort, one way or the other” (Melville 145). In Isabel, Melville demonstrates the necessary
context of language. “Father” is applied appropriately to Mr. Glendinning, but the
connection of signifier to signified does not relate the entire meaning of the signified to
Isabel. There are multiple levels of understanding required for a word like father: first she
must associate Mr. Glendinning with the word, and then she must understand that the
word applies to each individual subjectively (allowing her to make a claim on her father),
and finally she must understand the meaning of fatherhood in relation to her. Only
capable of the first level of understanding, the word takes on an entirely new meaning.
Melville aptly reflects the distorted and distanced relationship Isabel has with her father
in her very understanding of the word. He furthermore draws the reader’s attention to
Isabel’s (and thus the reader’s own) process of comprehending a word such as “father.”
In this sense, Melville demonstrates that a certain level of experience or knowledge is
required in language, that language is not merely the association between signifier and
signified.
Immediately after his “whirlingness of the bewilderingness” passage, Melville
allows Isabel to describe her overall relation to language in her own terms. She tells
Pierre, “I never affect any thoughts, and I never adulterate any thoughts; but when I
speak, think forth from the tongue, speech being sometimes before the thought; so, often,
my own tongue teaches me new things” (Melville 123). In her assertion that she never
“adulterates” thoughts, Isabel tells Pierre that her speech and her thoughts are one and the
same. They are inextricably intertwined; and so without speech she cannot remember,
and she cannot speak without calmness of mind or proper understanding. In Pierre,
language, like thought, becomes entirely subjective. In Isabel’s character, Melville
deconstructs the simplified notion that signifiers directly represent signifieds.
Because language is subjective in Pierre, there is no “absolute” form of
signification. Unlike Saussure, Melville asserts that there is no true concept to which a
sound-image is directly linked. Melville thus expands his denial of

31
Transcendentalist/Emersonian views of language not by explaining, but by demonstrating
language’s difficult twists and turns. Over a century after the publication of Pierre,
Jacques Derrida writes Of Grammatology, in which he articulates this same denial of
absolute signification. He first characterizes the Transcendentalist view of language. He
writes that “Even when the thing, the ‘referent,’ is not immediately related to the logos of
a creator God where it began by being the spoken/thought sense, the signified has at any
rate an immediate relationship with the logos in general (infinite or finite), and a
mediated one with the signifier, that is to say with the exteriority of writing” (Derrida
310). In other words, Derrida asserts that even when one does not associate a signified
with the mind or language of God, as Emerson does in “Language,” Transcendentalist
thought still assumes that the signified represents some general Truth. In a Platonic sense,
the signified is always a universal Form. Derrida later calls this the “transcendental
signified” (Derrida 314). In this Transcendentalist view, furthermore, the signifier is
always the intermediary for man’s connection to Truth. Writing thus becomes an
expression of Truth. Derrida challenges this view of language through the demonstrative
example of writing. When one writes, Derrida notes, one creates a written supplement for
a signifier. The written word “father” thus stands in for the real signifier “father,” which
is really the psychological imprint of the word. The signifier “father” moreover refers to
the concept of a father. Demonstrating the chain of reference to other forms, Derrida
concludes that “the supplement is always the supplement of the supplement” (Derrida
320). In breaking down the direct connections between written word and signifier and
signifier and signified, Derrida deconstructs the notion that any of these forms are
irreducible or “true.”
In Pierre, Melville manipulates each of these supplements. In his use of
neologisms and altered words, Melville manipulates the written supplement and creates
new signifiers. In his use of nouns as verbs, he maintains the written supplement, but
changes its signifier. And in his portrayal of Isabel’s understanding of “father,” he
maintains both the written supplement and the signifier, but deconstructs the sign. In each
of these examples, Melville consciously performs what Derrida calls “deconstruction,”
negating language’s relation to a “logos,” and drawing attention to the illogical processes
through which language is created and utilized. Most importantly, he demonstrates

32
language’s ambiguousnesses. In Melville’s Thematics of Form, Edgar A Dryden
describes Melville’s rejection of absolute forms of language. He writes, “For the narrator
of Pierre words are shadows of substance which do not help to free a man from his
enslavement to the world but instead bind him more tightly to its artificiality…Names, as
a matter of fact, turn out to be more artificial than the institutions or objects to which they
ostensibly refer” (Dryden 126). For Melville, then, the problem with language is this
deferred process of signification to which Derrida refers. Their constant supplementation
of new forms for others creates an artificial system that perpetually abstracts from things
or ideas while always operating under the illusion of Truth. Language is thus a trap of
artificiality.
Melville’s denial of Transcendental notions of language, however, and his
insistence on the artificiality and arbitrariness of language, is not entirely innocent. In his
very denunciation of signification, he is simultaneously in the process of signifying
through writing. Derrida acknowledges this paradox in his definition of deconstruction.
He writes:
The movements of deconstruction do not destroy the structures from
the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take
accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them
in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when
one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside,
borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion
from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say
without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise
of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.
(Derrida 317)
Deconstruction is thus a necessary failure. It can never escape the systems that it wishes
to critique. Melville could not critique language’s form and function without employing it
formally and functionally. Perhaps this apparent hypocrisy is at the heart of criticism’s
disavowal of Melville’s idiosyncrasies. To many critics, Melville seems nothing more
than a failed author in the midst of an existential crisis about authorship. Yet Melville’s
deconstruction is not nihilistic as these critics may suppose. He may not be able to
overcome language, but he can question it, and alert his readers to its foundational
problems. He can, moreover, describe language in Absolutes (as he does in the

33
comparison of Isabel’s understanding of “father” to a “true” one) in his very insistence
that Absolutes do not exist. What is important to Melville is awareness. Just as Pierre’s
ignorance of the inevitability of plagiarism in writing creates insurmountable barriers in
his novelistic project, an ignorance of the artificiality of writing creates unconquerable
ideologies about the Truth of language. Rather than running away from these realities,
Melville emphasizes them and then submits to them.
Narrativity
Perhaps Melville’s most frequently quoted phrase, “Call me Ishmael” from Moby-
Dick, begins Melville’s evolution in narrative structure (Melville Moby-Dick 18). Rather
than asserting “my name is Ishmael,” the narrator names himself, and the reader is forced
to question who he really is. “Ishmael’s” self-naming instantly places him in a role of
unreliability. Throughout the novel, Melville plays with this initial lack of certainty. At
times, Ishmael appears a character in the novel, at others he seems removed; accordingly,
his omniscience ebbs and flows. Indeed, the end of the novel, in which Ishmael
surprisingly survives after Moby Dick destroys the Pequod, places his entire tale in a
speculative light. Moby-Dick is thus the beginning of Melville’s experimentation with
narrative. When, in Pierre, Melville departs from his typical first-person main-character
narrative, he takes an initial step in expanding the experimentation of his previous novel.
Pierre continues to employ many of the same narrative tactics, always returning to
Melville’s central concern of narrative unreliability. Dryden asserts, in Melville’s
Thematics of Form, “It is important to recall that Pierre is Melville’s first departure from
the first-person narrative, a mode which emphasizes the movement from the living of an
experience to the inventing of it” (Dryden 128). In Moby-Dick, malaise is the end goal,
and Melville’s narrative twists end there. In Pierre, however, narrativity becomes one of
the central subjects of Melville’s parody of literature, and the uncertainty it creates
becomes one of his major themes.
Of the narrative’s unusual elements, critics often remark on the his eccentric
character. The narrator is dutifully invested in both Pierre’s life and in the act of telling it.
He enthusiastically leads the reader through Pierre’s terrible turns of fate, and always

34
impassionedly grants his personal opinion of Pierre. Where traditionally narrative
exclamations either take place in a first-person narrative in which the narrator is a
character, or in free indirect discourse, Pierre abounds in narrative exclamations about
the novel’s events. As he tells the reader about the idyllic romance between Pierre and
Lucy, the narrator exclaims, “Oh, those love-pauses that they know – how ominous of
their future; for pauses precede the earthquake, and every other terrible commotion!”
(Melville 25). The narrator’s personal and emotional investment in the novel is obvious;
he is frequently moved by the events he recounts, and seems incapable of maintaining
narrative distance from his characters.
Simultaneous to his personal investment in the story, the narrator is also
incredibly invested in the act of story-telling. The narrator delights in his narrative
position and revels in the knowledge that he holds over both reader and Pierre. From the
outset of the novel, the narrator’s foreshadowing is quite heavy-handed. In the very first
book, the narrator relates to his reader and insinuates the upcoming changes in Pierre’s
life. He writes, “Now Pierre stands on this noble pedestal; we shall see if he keeps that
fine footing; we shall see if Fate hath not just a little bit of a small word or two to say in
this world” (Melville 12). Only one page later, he tells the reader, “Nature intended a rare
and original development in Pierre. Never mind if hereby she proved ambiguous to him
in the end, nevertheless, in the beginning she did bravely” (Melville 13). In these opening
examples of foreshadowing, the narrator places himself on a similar level as that of Fate
and Nature. In doing so, he asserts his superiority over both Pierre and the reader.
As the narrator creates a simultaneous relationship to both reader and Pierre, he
oscillates between narrative and temporal levels. When the narrator inserts his own
thoughts and feelings into the narrative, Melville alerts the reader to the narrator’s own
temporal existence. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Pierre, William C.
Spengemann writes, “The reader becomes aware that, far from recounting a temporal,
past action from a timeless vantage point outside it, the narrator, too, is acting in time:
time in the life of a writer, who writes not to tell what happened to Pierre but to learn the
fate that his present verbal actions are preparing for him” (Spengemann xiv). The narrator
is not merely a voice, but someone who exists in his own time. Time passes as he tells his
story, and as he thinks aloud and speaks to the reader.

35
In these instances where the narrator directly appeals to the reader, his temporal
space coalesces with the reader’s; they exist in the same moment. Though his
foreshadowing asserts that he knows what is to come later in the novel, when the narrator
tells the reader “we shall see,” he enters into the same temporal space as the reader. In
this temporal space, the reader and the narrator experience together. Additionally, he
establishes a future for both of them in which they both arrive at knowledge of Pierre’s
fate.
Yet at other moments, the narrator seems to enter into Pierre’s temporal space,
writing in the present tense. Immediately after receiving the letter from Isabel, Pierre is
immersed in emotional turmoil. The narrator describes the crumbling image of Mr.
Glendinning in Pierre’s heart. As he does so, he speaks directly to Pierre and warns him
not to build a shrine to his new sister. The narrator is at once removed from Pierre’s
present time in his awareness of what is to come (when Pierre does dedicate his life to
Isabel), and immersed in Pierre’s present time. The narrator tells Pierre:
Pierre! thou art foolish, rebuild – no, not that, for thy shrine still
stands, it stands; Pierre, firmly stands, smellest thou not its yet
undeparted, embowering bloom? Such a note as thine can be easily
enough written, Pierre, imposters are not unknown in this curious
world, or the brisk novelist, Pierre, will write thee fifty such notes,
and so steal gushing tears from reader’s eyes; even as thy note so
strangely made thine own manly eyes arid; so glazed, so arid, Pierre
– foolish Pierre! (Melville 69-70)
As he implores Pierre to consider the possible falsity of the letter, the narrator establishes
what happens immediately before with the past tense “made thine own” and “glazed.” In
doing so, the narrator’s present tense voice converges with Pierre’s present moment,
when his teariness has just passed. Immediately following the narrator’s plea, Pierre’s
own voice replies to the narrator: “Oh! mock not the poniarded heart. The stabbed man
knows the steel, prate not to him that it is only a tickling feather. Feels he not the interior
gash? What does this blood on my vesture? and what does this pang in my soul?”
(Melville 70). Though one could argue that the defense of Pierre comes from the narrator
himself because of the words “prate not to him [Pierre],” the final questions of the
passage assert that it is indeed Pierre speaking. The narrator and Pierre are thus engaged

36
in a dialogue. In order for this to be possible (as much as such a temporal shift can be
possible), the narrator and Pierre interact in the same temporal space.
Early on in the novel, the narrator defends his narrative decisions. He writes, “The
history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls. Nimble center, circumference
elastic you must have” (Melville 54). Though at this moment he speaks specifically about
the ordering of events in the novel (which are not always chronological), the narrator’s
claim can equally be applied to his temporal role. He goes forward in time and back in
time as he sees fit; narrative time thus becomes “nimble” and “elastic.”
Along with his oscillating temporal space, the narrator oscillates between levels of
omniscience. From the outset of the novel, the narrative proceeds on the basis of
omniscience. The narrator easily delves into Pierre’s thoughts and emotions, as well as
those of others. Appropriately, the narrator’s first insight into Pierre’s mind is a
description of Pierre’s desire to have a sister. Writing that “he mourned” and “lavished,”
the narrator has a direct connection to Pierre’s inner life. He enters Pierre’s thoughts as
Pierre soliloquizes, “’Oh, had my father but had a daughter…some one whom I might
love, and protect, and fight for, if need be. It must be a glorious thing to engage in a
mortal quarrel on a sweet sister’s behalf! Now, of all things, would to heaven, I had a
sister!” (Melville 7). Pierre never expresses this sentiment to anyone else in the novel,
making the narrator alone privy to his deepest wishes.
Later in the novel, the narrator’s omniscience reaches into the mind of Mrs.
Glendinning. Suspecting that her son is on the brink of discovering some awful truth, she
advances toward her portrait. Gazing upon it, she, too, soliloquizes, “Yes, thou art
stabbed! but the wrong hand stabbed thee…I feel now as though I had borne the last of a
swiftly to be extinguished race. For swiftly to be extinguished is that race, whose only
heir but so much as impends upon a deed of shame” (131). The narrator is singularly
aware of the “deed of shame” over which Mrs. Glendinning distresses. Away from his
mother, Pierre has no way of perceiving her emotional turmoil in front of the portrait.
Only the narrator can see into her private life. The narrator, at this point, thus has
omniscience over not just Pierre, but the novel’s many characters. His omniscience is
seemingly complete.

37
As the novel progresses, however, the narrator’s omniscience becomes uncertain.
At one point, the narrator explicitly denies omniscience, telling the reader, “We know not
Pierre Glendinning’s thoughts as he gained the village” (Melville 162). Using Pierre’s
full name, the narrator creates a wedge between him and his protagonist that reflects his
abrupt lack of omniscience. The narrator makes another abrupt transition into non-
omniscience when Pierre reflects on Hamlet and the Inferno. In all but the final paragraph
of Book IX, the narrator’s omniscience is consistent. The narrator describes Pierre’s
scattered thoughts, writing twice, “his mind was wandering and vague” and then asserts
the profound effect the two pieces of literature have over Pierre (Melville 168). Despite
Pierre’s “vague” mind, the narrator at this point is still able to enter into it and read
Pierre. In the following section, the narrator then writes in free indirect discourse,
presumably mimicking Pierre’s thoughts exactly. He writes, “What more was there to
learn? What more which was essential to the public acknowledgement of Isabel, had
remained to be learned, after his first glance at her first letter? Had doubts of her identity
come over him to stay him? – None at all” (Melville 170). Amidst Pierre’s wandering
questions about his intentions for Isabel, the narrator is still able to perfectly perceive
Pierre’s definitive thoughts (“None at all”). Yet one page later, the narrator suddenly
claims, “Impossible would it be now to tell all the confusion in his mind presented in the
soul of Pierre, so soon as the above absurdities in his mind presented themselves first to
his combining consciousness” (Melville 171). The narrator seems unaware of his own
preceding writing, in which he is perfectly capable of cataloguing and replicating all the
thoughts of Pierre, despite all of their ambiguities. His lack of omniscience is startling
and unexplained. For a few sentences later, he immerses himself back into Pierre’s mind,
and tells the reader that Pierre’s “cheeks of his soul collapsed in him” (Melville 171).
The narrator’s omniscience only becomes more and more limited as the novel
continues. Critics frequently note this inconsistency in the narrative. In their essay “The
Flawed Grandeur of Melville’s Pierre,” Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker assert that
Melville fails to characterize Pierre’s internality in the second half of the novel with the
same expertise as the first half. As Melville places Pierre into the role of author, they
assert, his narrator loses insight into Pierre’s character. Higgins and Parker call this one
of the biggest flaws of the book; and even assert that without this inconsistency, Pierre

38
could be a great book. They contend, however, that in the narrator’s (seemingly)
inexplicable loss of omniscience, “Melville’s genius goes tragically to waste” (Higgins
and Parker 265).
This waning of interiority is perhaps not as inexplicable, or tragic, as Parker and
Higgins may assume. The declining levels of interiority in the novel directly correspond
to Pierre’s increasing role as author; there is a necessary causality in this relationship. In
his essay on narrativity, “The Implied Author in Melville’s Pierre,” Karl F. Knight
attempts to characterize the narrator and his role in the novel. Knight distinguishes the
narrator from both Pierre and Melville, suggesting that he is a separate character with his
own ambitions for the novel and his own opinions. He then defines the narrator with a
new name, calling him the “implied author.” Knight chooses this term because he
believes the narrator has a certain level of agency (thus, authorship) over the novel.
Knight writes, “He manipulates his materials and calls attention to himself as
manipulator” (Knight 165). He contends, however, that this implied author is decidedly
not omniscient, presenting many similar examples of his limited omniscience to those
above. Though Knight himself does not acknowledge this, his analysis is paradoxical in
its claim that the narrator can be both an author and non-omniscient. If the narrator is an
author, he necessarily has complete control over, and thus complete knowledge of, the
novel. Yet Knight’s terminology insinuates a possible explanation for this paradox. If the
narrator is an author, separate from Melville and Pierre, once Pierre becomes an author,
all three persons hold the same occupation. No longer merely a subject of authorship,
Pierre closes himself off to the narrator’s omniscience.
This phenomenon is best articulated in Priscilla Wald’s “Hearing Narrative
Voices in Melville’s Pierre.” Wald argues that Pierre, as he becomes an author, is writing
two narratives; he is consciously writing his own novel under the name Vivia, and
unconsciously writing his own fate. Wald argues that Pierre plagiarizes the latter
narrative as he writes the first. When the narrator finally allows the reader a glimpse at
Pierre’s writing, he demonstrates this very argument, writing, “He seems to have directly
plagiarized from his own experiences, to fill out the mood of his apparent author-hero,
Vivia” (Melville 302). Pierre’s failure as author, Wald says, is ultimately due to his
arduous attempts to take control of his own life through writing. In this sense, once he

39
becomes an author, Pierre attempts to take control over the narrative that is heretofore
under the control of the narrator. The narrator and Pierre, therefore, develop an
antagonistic relationship in the second half of the novel that explains the narrator’s
fluctuating levels of omniscience. At moments of Pierre’s authorship, where Pierre
asserts control over his own thoughts and emotions, the narrator loses this control.
Indeed, during the second half of the novel, the narrator’s highest level of
omniscience comes when Pierre is asleep, unable to battle for the authorship of his tale.
In this unusual passage, the narrator enters so deeply into the mind of Pierre that he
perceives as Pierre perceives. He writes, “During this state of semi-unconscious, or rather
trance, a remarkable dream or vision came to him. The actual artificial objects around
him slid from him, and were replaced by a baseless yet most imposing spectacle of
natural scenery” (Melville 342). As the narrator continues to recount Pierre’s dream, he
suddenly takes on a superior level of omniscience. As if becoming the dream itself, or
Pierre’s perception itself, the narrator switches into second person and tells Pierre what
he experiences. The narrator suddenly writes, “Quitting those recumbent rocks, you still
ascended,” and continues to address Pierre, writing, “you stood transfixed,” “distilled
upon you,” “you now sadly retraced your steps,” etc. (Melville 343-344). Where up until
this point, the narrator and Pierre struggle amongst themselves for authorial power, here
the narrator gains the fullest control of Pierre’s thoughts yet seen in the novel.
In the competition between Pierre and the narrator, Melville draws the reader’s
attention to the artificial control of narrativity. He demonstrates that neither protagonist
nor authorial hand can have complete control over a text. And as the antagonism between
Pierre and the narrator mounts, he makes narrativity a central concern not only of his
writing, but also of the content of the novel. When his full omniscience disappears, the
narrator instead places his focus on himself and the act of writing. And as his
omniscience wanes, it becomes only perceptible in descriptions of Pierre’s writing
process, of which Pierre disastrously has no control. This doubled focus on the act of
writing forces the reader to recognize the construction of narrative form in the novel. The
reader becomes increasingly aware of the narrator’s guiding hand in the work.

40
Throughout the novel, the narrator draws attention to his writing project. He
consistently provides preambles to sections of the story and rationalizes his choice in
telling them. In one of his most self-reflective moments, the narrator tells his reader:
So let no censorious word be here hinted of mortal Pierre. Easy for
me to slyly hide these things, and always put him before the eye as
immaculate, unsusceptible to the inevitable nature and the lot of
common men. I am more frank with Pierre than the best men are
with themselves. I am all unguarded and magnanimous with Pierre;
therefore you see his weakness, and therefore only. In reserves men
build imposing characters; not in revelations. He who shall be
wholly honest, though nobler than Ethan Allen, that man shall stand
in danger of the meanest mortal’s scorn. (Melville 108)
The narrator here reminds his reader that he is a manipulator of Pierre’s story. Though he
assures his reader that he is open to Pierre’s faults, he asserts his role in choosing which
information to present to the reader. The narrator informs the reader that his assumptions
about Pierre, his understanding of the story, are all based on what he chooses to represent.
By highlighting his own role in the story, and his deviation from fact-based story-telling,
the narrator illustrates the artificiality of narration and novelistic structure. And in his
final sentence, he contends that completely honest narratives are wholly unimaginable to
him.
Though the narrator consistently reminds the reader of his narrative manipulation,
he, too, becomes increasingly aware of his role as author in the second half of the novel.
Immediately before the reader learns of Pierre’s writing habits, the narrator gives his
infamous monologue:
Among the various conflicting modes of writing history, there would
seem to be two grand practical distinctions, under which all the rest
must subordinately range. By the one mode, all contemporaneous
circumstances, facts, and events must be set down
contemporaneously; by the other, they are only to be set down as the
general stream of the narrative shall dictate; for matters which are
kindred in time, may be very irrelative in themselves. I elect neither
of these; I am careless of either; both are well enough in their way; I
write precisely as I please. (Melville 244)
The narrator contends that narrative may only function on two organizational principles,
chronological or thematic. The choice between the two, he explains, must be based on

41
which makes the most sense for the order of events as they actually occur. Yet he tells his
reader that he does not care for either narrative form. As he tangentially jumps backward
in time to tell the reader about Pierre’s past writing experiences, the narrator rejects both
forms and breaks standard novelistic practice.
In such moments of authorial self-reflection, the narrator’s words seem to
imperceptibly blend with those of Melville. For Melville, too, as the real author of Pierre,
elects neither form of narrative structure. When Pierre becomes author, the dual
relationship of Melville-narrator to authorship becomes tripartite. The narrator’s
assertions about the act of writing seem to be just as plausibly those of Pierre or Melville.
Indeed, the desire to write as he pleases is a desire held by both Melville and Pierre.
Pierre’s authorial struggles largely surround his inability to make money from the
narrative he wishes to write. The narrator distinguishes between Pierre’s desire to write a
profound novel and the necessity of writing a novel that will sell. He tells the reader,
“Two books are being writ, of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled
one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf. That it is,
whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood, the other demands only ink. But
circumstances have so decreed, that the one cannot be composed on the paper” (Melville
304). Unable to write the “better” work on paper, unable to publish it, Pierre must contain
it inside his soul. The creation of two narratives begins to tear him apart as the better
book, eager to escape, devours him from the inside. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Melville also agonizes over the impossibility of making money from the book he truly
wishes to write. Talking about his upcoming novel, Moby-Dick, Melville tells
Hawthorne, “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, - it will not pay. Yet
altogether, write the other way I cannot” (Melville, Correspondence 191). Like Pierre,
Melville struggles to produce a work that will pay, and constantly desires for more. In
Pierre, Melville attempts to realize his desires, speaking vicariously through the
narrator’s assertion “I write precisely as I please.” The reader’s inability to distinguish
between the voices in such moments takes away the natural trust placed in authorship. In
the very act of telling the reader of their unusual narrative style, the three writers break
convention and confuse the reader’s sense of truth. Without one “true” voice of the novel,

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