Pierre: or, the Ambiguities is an all-over-the-place story that is extremely difficult to stay interested in. Although I tried to stay absorbed in this novel written by the famous author Herman Melville, I found it challenging to stay focused past reading one book! As stated right in the title, Pierre is ambiguous. In my opinion, Pierre’s thoughts are so ambiguous that the novel becomes boring quickly.
The summary of the story is intriguing – Pierre and his mother have a strange relationship that gets even more complicated when he finds out he has an illegitimate sister and then decides to marry her. But to actually read the novel is nowhere near as intriguing because as soon as the drama starts, Melville adds an extra chapter that slows down the storyline far too much making it very hard to want to continue reading. Overall, the novel is much too slow for enjoyment… unless you’re a reader that actually cares about something as irrelevant as Pierre’s encounter with the Memnon rock.
Melville makes the novel even more tough to read due to his usage of complicated words and phrases. I found myself looking up definitions to words too often to the point that it took away from the story plot. The language used in the novel is just too much for almost anyone.
In conclusion, I found this novel difficult to read for reasons that could’ve and should’ve been fixed. The long, drawn-out chapters about irrelevant and uninteresting things made me feel like I would never get to the good parts, and the language used was also an unnecessary barrier making the novel even more difficult to read. Although the plot was exciting, the way I felt when actually reading the novel takes away the positive aspects of this story.