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Abstract |
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A number of keywords scattered throughout Melville’s Pierre cast light on its enigmatical subtitle, “The Ambiguities,” and give us clues to the legitimate appreciation of the book.
The first and introductory keyword is “milk” which hints that the fiction of Pierre evolved out of a rural scene in Redburn, where innocent and inexperienced 19-year-old Redburn fell in instinctive love at the first sight of a beautiful girl who served him “a bowl of milk.” In both Redburn and Pierre, the protagonists are initiated into the dark side of human reality through the fall of their sanctified fathers. The first half of Pierre is contrasted with its second half as the scene shifts from the country to the city, paradise being set against hell, ideals against realities, light against darkness, joy against woe, life against death as well as innocence against initiation.
The second keyword, “Knight” suggests the “Black Knight” Pierre confronts and starts fighting against in the first half of the story is identical with the “Invulnerable Knight” in the second half of the story, who is Melville himself. The third keyword, “heart” tells us that Melville pursues the heart in Pierre, which has a double meaning, i.e. quests for the charitable heart and the depths of the human psyche.
Other keywords collectively clarify the main streams and structures of the novel, “ambiguities” hinting at intrinsic unclearness of the book, the “wall” implying a barrier which encloses Christendom swayed by ambiguous “expediency,” “incest” intimating an ambiguous man-woman relationship between Pierre and his supposedly half sister Isabel, “silence” preceding and accompanying both bodily and spiritual death while it also contains ambiguities, and “Hamletism” evinced in Pierre’s critical attitude toward Christian society that practices ambiguous “expediency.”
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