![]() Wall Street is also an important verbal symbol. Although Bartleby works for a Wall Street lawyer, not a stockbroker, his placement in the nation's financial center has obvious economic implications. ![]() The subtitle, "A Story of Wall Street," drives home this point. When Bartleby stops, is he still the scrivener? Can he be? Does he, and do we, acquire identities only through work? Or do people have inherent value whether or not they produce labor? The analogy between Bartleby and all of humankind becomes explicit in Melville's final two sentences: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" The concerned tone of this last line, and of the story, belongs to a narrator who, like his money-driven society, ironically drains Bartleby's life of energy even while mouthing pious personal concern for him. At the beginning of the story, the title character is a scrivener, or law copyist, the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of a human photocopying machine. Though this short work is best known simply as "Bartleby," its full title-"Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street"-is significant. He poses the question: "Why would someone prefer the independence of homelessness to the meager security that society offers the homeless?" By asking and not answering this question, he offers a puzzling story unusually open to interpretation. In the 1853 story "Bartleby," Herman Melville anticipates the alienation theme so common in the works of contemporary American writers. Bartleby is the politest form of rejecting all the reasons for which we have politeness.BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER: A STORY OF WALLSTREET He is absolutely outside the influence of what Jacques Lacan called the “Big Other”, that inner/outer voice that makes us gravitate towards a force that sanctions us. His is a more powerful defiance he is a figure who negates all the conventional, social, political and theological norms. Satan still wants there to be a universal monarchy, it’s just he wants to be its monarch.īartleby is different. Most of literature’s glorious proponents of defiance – I am thinking of Melville’s own Captain Ahab, but also Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or Steerpike in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy – are defying the person in power, not the structure of power. They eventually have Bartleby put in prison, where the narrator pays for him to have better meals, but he again prefers not to, and eventually dies of, what? Starvation? Melancholy? Because he did not prefer living? The overlooked subtitle is “A Story of Wall Street” Bartleby is a strange premonition of the Occupy Movement.Įventually, in frustration, the lawyer relocates his offices, but the new leaseholders become concerned about the man who sits all day on the banister. ![]() Bartleby is always there when work starts and stays after they leave on an unplanned visit on a Sunday, the narrator finds Bartleby there, and wonders if he is actually living in the offices. It is never said aggressively or impertinently. It is never “no”, never “will not”, never even an outright refusal. He tries to garner the slightest biographical scraps: “Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?” To which the answer is, of course: “I would prefer not to.” The narrator, who prides himself on knowing about Astor on prudence, Edwards on will and Priestley on necessity, cajoles, offers alternative employment, even a room in his own house. ![]() He says – and it is almost the only thing he ever says in the story: “I would prefer not to.” He instead prefers, if anything, to look at the blank brick wall that is the entire view from his window.įrustrated, Turkey and Nippers threaten to blacken his eye. He works “silently, palely, mechanically”, and on the third day of his employment is asked to proofread a document. Business is doing so well that the narrator takes on Bartleby, described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |