Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Paul Lewis (essay date 1983)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Paul Lewis (essay date 1983)

Paul Lewis (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: “Melville's Pierre and the Psychology of Incongruity,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XV, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 183-201.

[In the following essay, Lewis explores Pierre in terms of the various characters' responses to the incongruous, suggesting that this theme contributes to the overall ambiguity of the work.]

That sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

Melville, Moby-Dick

All of us are confronted with conflicts or problems that must be dealt with. By occasionally stepping back from the seriousness of the situation and approaching it with a sense of humor (sometimes called “looking on the light side”), we are...

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