SOURCE: Hall, Jonathan L. “‘Every Man of Them Almost Was a Volume of Voyages’: Writing the Self in Melville's Redburn.” American Transcendental Quarterly 5, no. 4 (December 1991): 259-71.

In the following essay, Hall discusses Melville's unconventional use of the maturation process and the construction of individual identity in Redburn.

Redburn (1849) is the closest Melville had ever come—or ever would come—to obeying the formal conventions of the mid-nineteenth-century novel. Yet for years criticism often centered on the difficulty of describing the relation of the young protagonist to the older narrative voice which claims a continuity with him. Melville was found guilty of “neglecting to keep his center of consciousness in Redburn's inexperience, … adding reflections that could only have occurred to someone much older” (Matthiessen 397), of a “disrupting shift in the angle of vision” (Gilman 208), of “abrupt transitions from youthful, ingenuous narrator to thoughtful, mature critic of society” (Gross 584).¹ It...