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This article confronts Melville’s Pierre or the Ambiguities with the three most vital essays on the sublime that the author may have read (Longinus, Burke and Kant). Its purpose is to successively unveil possible links among those theoretical texts and between them and the novel, bringing out inner concurrences and paradoxes. Eventually, it shows that however indebted to the aesthetics of the sublime, the work also corrodes them by resorting to irony and thus achieves the ambiguity it announced.