To be honest, the first thought came out of my mind when I finished Pierre was: ah, finally done. Pierre’s gone. The structure of the novel is actually attracting for readers. But for an amateur reader who neither regularly read novels nor familiar with older version English used in Melville’s book,it was a torture to get the meaning of sentences, chapters and how chapters are related. To make things even worse, I could not help myself thinking about there were hundreds of pages waiting and some of then even required to be read more than once to understand.
Despite all the difficulties that come from reading, the book is actually attracting. The experience of Pierre shows that failure can happen in anytime, at anywhere and divert reality from your intuition. The incest of siblings that had been separated for a long time provides a persuasive double symbol because it both discredits the secular world as an model of material interrelations between people and surroundings and shows true relations sometimes are based on the secret and predetermined pattern of attraction. I really like this incest part in the novel because for Pierre, incest is also a double symbol: a burden while also being a sublime.
In general, despite the unreadable attribution of Pierre, I would like to rate Pierre 4 stars out of 5, but once combined with the pain from reading, I would only give Pierre two and half stars as a novel.