The Piazza Tales Themes

There's a lot of compassion in "The Piazza Tales". The narrator in "The Piazza" feels sympathy and pity for Marianna for example—which is a little odd because Marianna seems to just be a figment...

Melville is known as a writer of rip-roaring, whale-snorting sea stories, so it makes sense that The Piazza Tales would have some tales of folks marooned and abandoned far from home. Melville's als...

As with exile, isolation can by physical or spiritual. With Melville (who likes his metaphors physical) it's often both at once, like out in the Galapagos, where folks sit on the islands all alone...

Babo pretends to be a slave; Bannadonna hides his clockwork contraption; Bartleby won't say where he's from. Melville's work is filled with deception and little twist endings, many of which don't t...

There's a lot of literature in The Piazza Tales. Melville constantly refers to other writers and books—Spenser, Shakespeare, the Bible, Greek myths (Yes, you can Shmoop all of those). These allus...

Melville is an adventure writer who likes to talk about just sitting there. "The Piazza" and "Bartleby" are both about nothing happening…but even "Benito Cereno", which has swashing and buckling...

Whose side is Melville on in "Benito Cereno"? Is he, like Captain Delano, a racist, who thinks the slaves are evil revolutionaries who deserve death? Or does he think Delano is a vicious clod, whos...

Reality in Melville's stories is often tricky. There's Mariana spinning in her house, and then whoops she isn't; Babo is a good servant and then not so much; "The Encantadas" are called the Enchant...