The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

A Mute Goes Aboard a Boat on the Mississippi.

The single-day-single-boat scheme uses the mute → Black Guinea → Mark Winsome → China Aster chain to allegorize commercial credulity; the picaresque refuses traditional arc and pays in cumulative exposure, so plot scores 72.

In the forward part of the boat, not the least attractive object, for a time, was a grotesque negro cripple, in tow-cloth attire and an old coal-sifter of a tamborine in his hand, who, owing to something wrong about his legs, was, in effect, cut down to the stature of a Newfoundland dog; his knotted black fleece and good-natured, honest black face rubbing against the upper part of people's thighs as he made shift to shuffle about, making music, such as it was, and raising a smile even from the gravest.

The cream-colored Cosmopolitan, the one-eyed nutmeg-dealer, Mark Winsome the philosopher, Black Guinea the bootblack, Charlie the nephew, China Aster the Marietta candle-maker, and Old Honesty his dream-angel function as a single confidence-facade, so cast scores 86.

usuprs your larynx. It is Mark Winsome that speaks, not Charlie.

Forty-five short chapters on a single April-1st ride intentionally drag between philosophical exchanges; only the nested China Aster parable re-accelerates the comic-moral pressure, so pace scores 70.

the shade of ground glass was all round fancifully variegated, in transparency, with the image of a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo.

The Manco-Capac opening sentence, the cream-colors stranger, Black Guinea's dialect, and the horned-altar / haloed-man lamp combine Fielding-and-Swift through Mississippi allegory, so prose scores 92.

Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and...

St. Louis wharf, Missouri cotton-planters in drab, the barber's shop as pulpit, the Cosmopolitan's cabin, the steamboat deck outside Cairo — a complete antebellum-American trust-microcosm, so world scores 90.

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

The Manco-Capac sun-myth simile + the cream-colored stranger with "no trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel" + the placard offering a reward for the impostor installs the confidence-riddle in the second paragraph, so hook scores 94.

Something further may follow of this Masquerade.

Nested parables (China Aster inside Charlie inside the Cosmopolitan), first-person-free third person, and the deliberately-unfinished coda establish a model for Twain, late James, and postmodern picaresque, so innov scores 95.

The next moment, the waning light expired, and with it the waning flames of the horned altar, and the waning halo round the robed man's brow; while in the darkness which ensued, the cosmopolitan kindly led the old man away. Something further may follow of this Masquerade.

The Cosmopolitan extinguishes the lamp, leads the old man away, the novel refuses to close; allegorical confidence resolved as darkness, so ending scores 86.