Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Wai-chee Dimock (essay date 1984)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Wai-chee Dimock (essay date 1984)

Wai-chee Dimock (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: “Pierre: Domestic Confidence Game and the Drama of Knowledge,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 396-409.

[In the following essay, Dimock discusses the various characters' quests for knowledge in Pierre and concludes that, since the self proves to be unknowable in the novel, all the individual quests eventually degenerate into ambiguity.]

“They know him not;—I only know my Pierre;—none else beneath the circuit of yon sun.”

“All's o’er, and ye know him not!”

Lucy's and Isabel's pronouncements about Pierre, appearing near the beginning and at the very end of the book, both dwell on a single—and to them, presumably the most important—activity: “knowing” Pierre. Pierre has often been discussed as the protagonist's quest for knowledge. One tends to overlook the same...

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