Mardi, Vol. 2 (Unabridged)

Mardi is Melville's first purely fictional work. In it he contemplates man's beliefs, and questions whether or not one faith has value over another--or is it all simply a sham? Mardi is a poetically existential analysis of religious truths as told through the protagonist's allegorical wanderings across the South Pacific. But is this all that Mardi is?