SOURCE: Lee, A. Robert. “Voices Off and On: Melville's Piazza and Other Stories.” In The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story, edited by A. Robert Lee, pp. 76-102. London: Vision, 1985.

In the following essay, Lee discusses Melville's use of narrative voice to express multiple perspectives in his short stories.

In summer, too, Canute-like, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising...