Toward an Ethic of Failure in Three Novels by Herman Melville

Abstract

Abstract Herman Melville's final novel, The Confidence-Man, unsettles conventional Western ethics by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. In this late work, Melville shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in their understanding and justify their moral choices. I use these insights from The Confidence-Man to shed light on Melville's opposition to the missionaries' work of civilizing and converting the South Sea Islanders in his earlier travelogues. In Typee, his first novel, Melville demonstrates that layers of existence—in fact, real human lives—are denied when the story of human relations is framed as a narrative of progress. This article concludes by proposing that Melville attempts to rework the idea of failure as a potential strategy against the totalizing narrative of advancing rationalism.