When he arrives at the office he appears to be breaking some kind of fast:. At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. Bartleby is and is not what he eats. Bartleby survives on handfuls of gingernuts which are then consumed alone.
The phrase is, we might say, regurgitated, burped, repeated, in the text, and this calls to mind the impossibility of digestion and satiation for Bartleby. He refuses, in effect, to be fed, except insofar as he feeds on himself. By the end of the story, the constant refusals wear everyone down.
Locked away in prison, Bartleby refuses to eat:. So saying, he slowly moved to the other side of the enclosure and took up a position fronting the dead-wall.
Even in death -the ultimate defence- Bartleby is mild and courteous. He politely refuses to eat, and simply so to live. Curled up, foetus-fashion, he becomes identified with the object against which his head rests -the prison wall. We are prepared for this early on by references to his pallid complexion, his withdrawal from social life and refusal to take anything- food, money and even the offer of human empathy.
Indeed, his exit is quiet and contained. For the time he survives he does so on nothing. He makes no demands, and is constantly in the position of reaction. Bartleby does not revolt in terms of a physical attack, but through a repeated set of verbal refusals, he achieves the effect of revolt.
In anorexic style, he is able to live while taking no nourishment, either physical or spiritual. His is a quiet battle, concerned less with attack than defence. The small man in his small way interferes with processes which are repetitive and uncreative. In , Q. This characteristically dogmatic view is not only outmoded, but is demonstrably inaccurate.
Some readings overemphasise aspects or elements of the story at the expense of others. In , when the psycho-critics were refining their notions of doppelgangers and split selves, Marvin Felheim, in an article in College English , tried to categorise the various treatments of the story.
His categories were not helpful, but his project highlighted two readings of the story that were particularly popular. Bartleby becomes the archetypal clerk, a figure bowed to his task and of whom it is demanded absolute compliance and reliability.
He fights by refusing to fight and so he has become an icon for various Peace Movements in the twentieth century. It is a story about the failure of modern social life. It is also the story of political unrootedness, of the consequences of living in a society operating at an alienatingly high level of production and consumption. Thoreau went to jail for not paying his poll-tax because it contributed to slavery , but unlike Bartleby whose sense of self is dramatically reduced by confinement, Thoreau felt that to be physically immured was not to lose his sense of personal civic liberty:.
I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. Another aspect that leaves Turkey as the conformist is that he never forgets his place. Anytime he. Get Access. Read More. Plot, Setting, Point of View, and Tone in Bartleby the Scrivener Words 6 Pages In the short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener," Herman Melville employs the use of plot, setting, point of view, characterization, and tone to reveal the theme.
Character, Setting, and Point of View in Bartleby the Scrivener Words 7 Pages Point of View in Bartleby the Scrivner Herman Melville, who is now considered one of the greatest American writers was "deprived of an optimistic view on life after the bankruptcy and death of his father". Comparing Bartleby, The Scrivener And Bartleby Words 7 Pages The secondary title for the novel, A Story of Wall-Street, sets the stage for what has become another moral dilemma of man — the importance of commerce placed over the importance of life.
Relationship Between Society And The Individual Words 9 Pages relationship between the individual and society that is reflected in the written pieces of each time, revealing the connection between oneself and the collective spanning across the centuries. Popular Essays. And this is what we can learn from "Bartleby": the signifiance of impacting a society's everyday language. For as much as the narrator of "Bartleby" resists the idea that his employee's passive protest has affected his thinking, it is evident from the response documented in the story, just as it is evident in the media's response to the OWS movement, that introducing new language into conversation—even with inscrutable intentions—leaves its mark on tongues, minds, and hearts.
Her research interests include early American literature and culture, food studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. Between and , she worked as an educational technology consultant for One Laptop per Child, a non-profit aimed at bringing low-cost laptops to children in the developing world.
View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Blog Post. Save to My Colloquies. Consider this passage from "Bartleby," in which the narrator recognizes the impact of Bartleby's language on himself and his employees: Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word "prefer" upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. Lauren Klein's blog.
Personal website. Perhaps one of the things Melville House is known for is celebrating a specific renegade art form: the novella. Our first pick? Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. It has since become a principal example of the importance of the novella.
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