Parody of Christian Allegory in Melville's Pierre or, the Ambiguities

Abstract

The present research is based on Herman Melville's novel Pierre or, the Ambiguities to see how Melville has parodied Christian allegory. The novel focuses the relationship between father and son where both characters are identically named. This sort of relationship between father and son implies that of God and Adam but it becomes problematic when son knows that the father had long ago seduced and abandoned an innocent young woman. The novel also presents the similarities of different Christian texts, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Divine Comedy as well as Inferno, as the example to prove it as an allegorical text, and at the same time it subverts the ideas of those texts. As a result, it creates humour with the idea that if there is God and if He is the source of all then He must be the primary source of evil.