Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Priscilla Wald (essay date 1990)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Priscilla Wald (essay date 1990)

Priscilla Wald (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville's Pierre,” in boundary 2, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 100-32.

[In the following essay, Wald characterizes Pierre as an endless succession of narrative voices and perspectives that requires the readers' participation in making conclusions about the events of the novel.]

Melville's Pierre inaugurates the tradition of author protagonists in American literature.1 Pierre Glendinning's declaration of independence from an authorizing cultural discourse immediately precedes his resolve to write a novel that will “gospelize the world anew.” But his narrative consciousness underwrites his apparently resistless damnation, as Pierre submits precisely to those self-evident truths that he has ostensibly rejected. Pierre, we learn, is actually writing two books, and the unconsciously authored narrative that dooms him deconstructs...

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