Calvin Cohn: Confidence Man. Interpreting Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace As a Parody of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man

Abstract

This thesis interprets Bernard Malamud's God's Grace (GG) as a parody of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (CM). It contrasts the two works in terms of historical milieu, setting, genre, plot, structure, and characters. Furthermore, it delves into a comparative thematic analysis, exploring such topics as God, theodicy, the Fall, evolution, an anti-Christian polemic, misanthropy, confidence (faith), deception, isolation, madness, imagery of the bottle, time, apocalypse, Apocrypha, slavery, and optimism and pessimism. My main conclusion is that there is overwhelming evidence to support a Melvillean reading of GG. I contend that Malamud deliberately modeled GG on CM and that CM is the most important source in a literary analysis of Malamud's final novel published during his lifetime. Malamud used other sources to be sure, but his reliance on CM is so painstaking and all-encompassing that no Malamud scholar can gain a full understanding of GG without reading and studying CM in depth.