ABSTRACT
It is with fiction', Melville wrote in The Confidence Man, "as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie'. The object of all Melville's novels was, through the fictional world, to elucidate the mysterious correspondences between the seen and the unseen that stirs, half-recognised, within it. Melville was assimilating ideas, sensations, formulating basic attitudes, assembling from his experience, and inventing, those incidents which magically extend into the retiring perspectives of spiritual meaning. In White-Jacket Melville mentions Volpone as a play he has read and admired. In Billy Budd Melville proceeded with the idea of placing in some weighted situation such a character as the old man at first appears to be. Unlike Poe and Cooper, Melville was a familiar of both worlds and each was a factor in his reconciliation to the society whose fundamental conflicts he so surely apprehended in his writings.
