A Brief Introduction:
Pierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville

March 25, 2025

The fact that Moby-Dick is an established work in the canon of Western Literature often conceals the fact that it is an utterly bizarre novel. The fact that its structure-less plot is as meandering as an ocean current; that it is chock full of Shakespearean dialogues and monologues delivered by uneducated sailors; and that it contains many chapters whose entire purpose is to expound upon a single eccentric metaphor, reveals Moby-Dick to be about as far as you can get from the idea of novel-writing as a form of craftsmanship. Moby-Dick does not follow a formula, and its style, while impeccable and charming, is influenced more by Romantic philosophers than contemporary novelists. It is the mad work of an individual, in the sense that Kierkegaard meant when he requested the epitaph on his tombstone read, “Here lies The Individual.”

Pierre, or the Ambiguities, the novel Herman Melville wrote directly following Moby-Dick, is not an established work in the canon of Western Literature. It is somehow more bizarre even than its predecessor, even more maligned by the critics of its time, and even harder to understand to this day. The elevated language and pomposity that characterizes Moby-Dick's more enthusiastic sections is here sustained throughout an entire novel, to the point where it becomes almost ridiculous. The first dialogue of the novel, between two teenagers, contains the line, “I would return thee thy manifold good mornings, Lucy, did not that presume thou had’st lived through a night; and by Heaven, thou belong’st to the regions of an infinite day!”

This first section of Pierre reads almost like a joke. The overwrought Shakespearean dialogue, replete with thees and thous, and the gaudy description of the idyllic rural landscape, feel like the work of an author who is writing merely to amuse himself. And there is no doubt in my mind that this is the case.

Melville once stated in a letter that he intended Pierre, or the Ambiguities to be enjoyed by women, and I believe we can gleam a lot of information from this assertion. But first, we must understand the context of what a female reader was in the 19th century. Like today, one of most popular genres of literature among women was romance: stories of heroic and fantastical love. Pierre is, among everything else it is, a love story, featuring a beautiful, innocent, and intelligent young girl and a strapping aristocratic lad with a genius for poetry.

But more than this, what I think Melville desired when setting out to court a female audience was a different kind of reader. Melville began his career writing adventure stories about his experiences on Polynesian islands, which were quite popular. Critics and readers alike were entertained by the shocking details of a world they’d never imagined, as well as the idyllic beauty that Melville so wonderfully captured. However, when Melville turned toward more imaginative and literary works, with both Mardi and Moby-Dick, his erstwhile readers turned on him.

I believe a large part of the problem here was that Herman Melville was out of step with the times. He was a Classical Romantic and highly imaginative poetic thinker in a time of business and “seriousness.” The critics of the day found both Mardi and Moby-Dick frivolous, because the novels refused to take themselves seriously: they were unrealistic, overly literary in style, and unstructured in form.

What we run into here are two distinct methods of being “serious.” On the one hand, seriousness is characterized by the surface appearance of a calm objectivity bordering on indifference. It means not laughing and not having fun, but keeping a steady look on your face as you discuss mature, masculine topics such as business and politics. It means not falling into flights of fancy, not navel-gazing, and generally not wasting time on frivolities.

Herman Melville, like most artists, is not this kind of serious person. His wont is to smoke a pipe and discuss abstract philosophical questions purely for the fun of it. His books are entertaining, full of jokes and comic moments. But Melville has a different kind of “seriousness” to him also, and his works are far from frivolous. Melville’s seriousness is the kind that involves delving deeply and wholeheartedly, exploring a topic with the entire emotional aspect of one’s being, and not being content with surface appearances. Melville’s work is serious in the sense that it is wholly earnest; even the initial section of Pierre that reads like a pastiche is not satirical. Melville is not lampooning the gothic romance, but embracing it with open arms, and enjoying himself immensely while doing so.

Melville was searching for a new audience that took its seriousness differently. Women, at the time, were generally thought to read merely for pleasure, while men read for more serious reasons. Sick of the faux-seriousness of these worldly men, Melville, by aiming his novel toward women, was trying to reach an audience that truly enjoyed literature in the same way he did. He was looking for an audience that didn’t mind if a story was fanciful or illogical, abound with sentimentality and romance, as long as it told a good story.

Pierre never reached such an audience, neither among women nor men. In fact, I’m pretty sure that, aside from the scholars who put together the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of his collected works, I’m the only person in the world who appreciates Pierre at the level I do. If you disagree with that assertion, please send me an e-mail. I’d love to talk with you.

An unrepentant romance written in an age of realism; a Shakespearean tragedy wrapped in the clothes of the American Gothic; a novel of ambiguities presented to a critical world obsessed with moral purity, Pierre is a fundamentally antagonistic work.

Herman Melville poured his entire being into Moby-Dick, in an attempt to express what lay deep inside of him, and few were those who even tried to understand it. Instead, he was told that he had failed by those who had never tried; or worse, he was told that he was putting on a front, hiding behind colourful language and psuedo-philosophical metaphors in order to hide that he was, at heart, a writer of adventure stories — nothing more, and nothing less. He was told that he was not a man, and not an Individual, but an entertainer. And the audience demanded to be entertained.

It is no surprise that a sensitive and lonesome artist would respond to all this with spite and anger. What began as an attempt to reconcile with his critics, to write a genuinely popular and appealing novel, gradually morphed into an alienating story of frustration, isolation, and anger. The young and blissful Pierre in his idyllic world of love and comfort lashes out at the slightest hint of being misunderstood, and escapes to a personal Hell. There, like Milton’s Satan, he relishes in the fact that at least this Hell is his own.

The characters in Pierre do not make sense as people. They don’t act in ways that correspond to our reason or often even our emotions. They act the way they do because they are the product of a particular mind at a particular time. Their actions don’t correspond to the reality of the novel; the relationship of cause-and-effect is instead metatextual. What I mean by this is that Pierre lashes out because Herman Melville is angry. Lucy follows him not because of her inner psychology, but because Herman Melville needs someone to sympathize with a man who chooses to abandon the world in order to be himself.

How are we supposed to reckon with such a novel? Shall we censure its self-indulgence and its aloofness to our sensibilities as novel-readers? That is the easiest option, for sure, and if we view novels as entertainment, as something written purely for our enjoyment and our understanding, then it’s the only reasonable option. However, this leads us only to the simple conclusion that Pierre, or the Ambiguities is a bad novel. This may be enough for some, but for those who read Moby-Dick and felt that it wasn’t just a novel but that it was something more; for those who read Moby-Dick and felt that it spoke directly to them, that it provided a glimpse of a human being who was desperate to allow them into his mind and into his heart, it is a deeply unsatisfying conclusion.

I want to understand Pierre, or the Ambiguities. I want to know why it is the way it is. I want to know why I am haunted by its anguish and its cruelty and also by its beauty. I want to know why Pierre, or the Ambiguities feels like the most real and honest book ever written, while also feeling wholly artificial and contrived from its beginning to its end. Pierre is the work of a master whose mastery is so innate and so unique that it’s difficult to even tell what he’s a master of.

I accept that Pierre, or the Ambiguities fails to meet many of the criteria we use to judge great novels. I accept that Pierre, or the Ambiguities is strange in a way that often feels amateurish rather than intentional. I further accept that Pierre, or the Ambiguities will not appeal to 99% of readers. But all that being said, I consider it my duty to present to you Pierre, or the Ambiguities in the most generous and loving way possible, and if only 1% of my love for this book is communicated through what I’ve written here today, I will consider this introduction a great success.

APPENDIX: AN EVEN BRIEFER INTRODUCTION TO MOBY-DICK