Pierre; Or the Ambiguities
1852
Pierre Glendinning seems to have it all: wealth, beauty, a loving mother, and the devotion of Lucy Tartan, his gentle fiancée. But when the death of his father reveals a devastating secret, Pierre has a half-sister named Isabel, born from an illicit union, everything unravels. In a gesture that feels like honor but seeds destruction, Pierre rushes to marry Isabel, only to watch his world collapse: his mother disowns him, Lucy is shattered, and he finds himself exiled to New York with a woman who may be his sister and may be something more. As Pierre writes his magnum opus, a book that will expose his family's shame, he descends into paranoia, jealousy, and eventually murder. This is Melville's darkest vision: a novel about the lies we tell ourselves, the ambiguity at the heart of identity, and how trying to do right can lead to absolute catastrophe. Written in the wake of Moby-Dick's rejection, Melville poured his own despair into a book so radical, so unflinching, that it effectively ended his career. Yet it now reads as the first great modernist novel, an explosion of psychological complexity decades before its time.
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“I would prefer not to.””
— Herman Melville
“Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.””
— Herman Melville
“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!””
— Herman Melville
“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.””
— Herman Melville
“I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.””
— Herman Melville
“To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.””
— Herman Melville
“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,' was his mildly cadaverous reply.””
— Herman Melville
“My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it. What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.””
— Herman Melville
“Preferiría no hacerlo””
— Herman Melville
