The meaning and the value of The Confidence-Man

There's a significant passage about half-way through Herman Melville's (last) novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (to give it its full title, correctly punctuated (btw can anyone explain why the title of his greatest novel is Moby-Dick but throughout the novel there is no hyphen?) in which Melville anticipates the likely criticism of the weirdly shapeshifting title character: he notes that writers are considered realistic if their characters are consistent and writers are considered flawed or fantastical if their characters change radically but, he argues, in life people are not consistent and do change radically and therefore a novel with consistent characters is not true to life. Well, perhaps: people don't change radically as much as one might say people grow, evolve, learn, suffer, transform - but we're not caterpillars that suddenly emerge as butterflies. The naturalistic or realistic novelist helps us see and understand and feel the evolution of great characters. There's nothing intrinsically wrong w/ Melville's approach to character but it's a bit self-ingenuous of him to call his characters - or anything else about TCM - realistic - they are not. The book is a comic, fantastical tale, almost like a Biblical narration, examining deception, conceit, and human frailty: the eponymous (you knew I'd use that word) C-M represents in some manner all of the temptation we feel and experience on our course - like a river voyage - through life; his genius, such as it is, lies in his ability to use the particular weakness (vanity, greed, etc.) of the characters he confronts to gain their "confidence" and to undo them (generally, by bilking them of $). These scenes are not realistic nor obviously meant to be: e.g., a miser completely seduced by the C-M in about ten minutes and turning over hundreds of dollars to buy shares in a stock, with no receipts etc. - but on the other hand, how different is this from the stock schemes, bank fraud, and securities scams of our era - though those are played out by much more slick characters? The book is a parable, still relevant - though I'm not sure how informative, as the targets are pretty obvious and easy. It's a very difficult book to read and I'm finding it at this point not all that engaging; to be honest, the only reason we read it I think is because of Melville's great works that surround it; it's so odd and mysterious that we think that it may hold a key to understanding M's way of thinking, which makes this dense and encoded work a natural for grad students - but not all that entertaining for the average, even the avid, reader today.