Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Bert C. Bach (essay date 1970)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Bert C. Bach (essay date 1970)

Bert C. Bach (essay date 1970)

SOURCE: “Narrative Technique and Structure in Pierre,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 7, Part I, Summer, 1970, pp. 5-8.

[In the following essay, Bach discusses the various levels of narration in Pierre and suggests that the alternating narrative voices help to unify the work.]

In late 1851 Herman Melville, weary from his struggles to see Moby-Dick through publication, had no burning ambition for his next fictional production. Pierre would be a pastoral romance with a touch of the gothic and would, he hoped, regain some of the money and reputation with publishers that he had lost by his two previous publications, Mardi and Moby-Dick. In a letter written to his publisher Bentley on April 16, 1852, he indicated his assumption that his new book would prove agreeable to public taste: “And more especially am I impelled to decline those overtures upon the...

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