The confidence man uses various methods of persuasion to sell patent medicine, encourage speculation in fraudulent business, donate to non-existent charities, and other cons.

The inclusion of multiple genres of writing is reminiscent of literary magazines of the day, tapping into journalistic uncertainty about the fiction and non-fiction status of the work.

The novel includes religious themes and shows how an economy that assumes generosity must adapt when characters like the confidence man take advantage of those assumptions.

The April account in the Albany Evening Journal, where the confidence man pretends to be an acquaintance of a jewelry store employee, and then draws attention to their shared membership in Freemasonry to gain sympathy for a monetary donation, is very similar to Ringman's con in chapter 4 of the novel.

[8] The Temperance movements in the 1850s led to legislation that outlawed drinking in several states, and many people believing that alcohol was injurious to one's physical and mental health.

Duyckinck also reprinted a column from Merchant's Ledger in the Literary World that stated that those who were not fooled by the confidence man were on their way to becoming a "hardened villain", since they are suspicious of everyone's motives.

Before writing The Confidence-Man, Melville sent his friend Nathanial Hawthorne suggestions on how to adapt a real-life anecdote about a woman who waited for her husband for 17 years as a short story.

[19] While visiting New York in December 1855 (during the composition of the novel), Melville read the entry on himself in Cyclopaedia of American Literature written by Evert Duckinck and his brother.

After being warned that he could be swindled by a man in a cap, a young college student buys stock in Black Rapid Coal Company from John Ringman.

An unnamed narrator relates how Ringman lost a wife and child and is now raising money to get custody of his daughter, which makes Roberts and the man in a cap sympathetic to him.

"[26] Contemporary reviewers described the style as "controlled, vivid, extraordinarily powerful, graphic, fresh, and entertaining" while being oblivious to the novel's critiques of Christianity.

"[32] In the recently-discovered longer reviews, the Troy Daily Whig found how Melville puts the confidence man on display "entirely original".

The monthly newspaper United States Journal acknowledged the craftsmanship of the novel, but was highly critical of it, calling it a "desecration of the fine talents and affluent genius of the author.

"[34] The Athenaeum called the novel a "moral miracle-play" for its focus on how various characters interact in dialogue with the confidence man, either as credulous dupes or would-be followers.

They acknowledged that Melville's style is "one, from its peculiarities, difficult to manage" but that he "pours his colours over the narration with discretion as well a prodigality", concluding that the novel was "invariably graphic, fresh, and entertaining.

"[35] London's Leader described Melville's style as full of "festoons of exuberant fancy" interspersed with descriptions of the American steamboat and surrounding landscape.

[36] A review from Literary Gazette was not as generous and described the book not as a novel, but as a series of forty-five conversations, which "so far resembling the Dialogues of Plato as to be undoubted Greek to ordinary men."

They conceded that "this caldron, so thick and slab with nonsense, often bursts into the bright, brief bubbles of fancy and wit" and concluded that the book was ruined with "strained effort after excessive originality.

"[37] A review at Spectator did not appreciate the "local allusions" in the work, and found the satirical style to be "drawn from the European writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with some of Mr. Melville's own Old World observations superadded.

[42] Melville biographer Delbanco called the book "a prophetically postmodern work in which swindler cannot be distinguished from swindled and the confidence man tells truth and lies simultaneously".

[42] Writing in the Columbia Literary History of the United States, Robert Milder wrote, "Long mistaken for a flawed novel, the book is now admired as a masterpiece of irony and control, although it continues to resist interpretive consensus.

"[43] Watson Branch, an associate professor in comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati, divided the structure of The Confidence-Man into four parts: 1) conversations between the six avatars of the Confidence Man and his targets, which result in success or failure; 2) conversations between the cosmopolitan (another avatar) and other steamboat passengers on the topics of friendship and confidence; 3) the frame of the story, consisting of the events at the beginning and end of the novel; and 4) interruptions of various material, including the digressions by the narrator and stories told by passengers, as well as later digressive additions.

However, stylistically, unlike Candide, The Confidence-Man "is [a satire] of subtle, pervasive, elusive irony, of suggestion and understatement rather than exaggeration, of talk rather than action.

This identification leads into Trimpi's observation that routinely "his [the Confidence-Man's] antagonist is a Democrat, Nativist or other opponent of the Republicans" and the collision of each character's worldview of human nature as good or selfish in the various cons.

[63][64] Rather than a religious allegory, McGettigan sees the book as "novel and periodical, original and copy, frustrating and pleasurable"—a work that attests to "the aesthetic power and creative potential of multiplicity.

"[66] In a book on theater and the Market in America, Jean-Christophe Agnew, an American studies professor at Yale, saw The Confidence-Man as looking backward and forward like Janus.

"[67] Foster called the character of the Confidence Man "Melville's most ironic and bitter presentment of his half-mystical apprehension of evil at the heart of things," or in other words, the Devil.

The exchange between the barber William Cream and his customer Frank Goodman illustrates the deeply cynical outlook The Confidence-Man takes towards gift economies.

The satire, while trying to find a rational explanations for "Indian nature" as well as Indian-hating, which Ravina states, "points to the limitations of empirical investigations of race and the limitless bias of ethnographic description, which can never have the objectivity its authority performs."

"[81] Ravina generalizes the issues these chapters raise, seeing them "as an impetus for readers to recognize the representational limits of their sources and the racial dynamics of power and speech.