Much as did Typee and Omoo, Mardi details the travels of an American sailor who abandons a whaling vessel to explore the South Pacific.

It briefly becomes romance when the narrator falls in love with a mysterious woman he has questionably rescued from a difficult situation.

As the main characters continue their search for the woman, the novel switches again, now focusing on more than travelogue-style reporting of the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells to be experienced in Mardi.

The social conventions, political structures, religious practices, odd histories, and other aspects of each isle and its inhabitants spark philosophical discourses between four main characters, with two previously main characters no longer in the story and the narrator receding so far into the background that he does not even participate in the philosophical discussions.

The middle portion of the book is taken up by "a series of forays in social and political satire, and by quasi-metaphysical speculations" that are, if at all, at best "only loosely and uncertainly related to the quest for Yillah".

[5] Nathaniel Hawthorne found Mardi a rich book "with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life ... so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better.

"[6] The widespread disappointment of the critics hurt Melville yet he chose to view the book's reception philosophically, as the requisite growing pains of any author with high literary ambitions.

"[7] In the description of Arvin: [T]he thoughts and feelings he was attempting to express in Mardi were too disparate among themselves and often too incongruous with his South Sea imagery to be capable of fusion into a satisfying artistic whole.