What is the point, meaning, or moral of Bartleby the Scrivener? Is it an allegory? If so of what?
I’d tell you, but…
…you would prefer not to??
I think in my 10th grade Survey of American Lit class I was one of the few students who actually read the stories that we were assigned. I always like Bartleby and have read it several times since.
A tad bit depressing, I merely thought it was a tale about alienation and how someone might, for whatever reason, lose the will to live. As the narrator makes every reasonable attempt to reach out and make some type of contact to Bartleby he remains too far out of reach since he had apparently lost his soul. I think this was a relatively popular concept of the romantic movement in literature i.e. defining the soul and Melville takes his stab at it here.
We should talk about “Young Goodman Brown” some day.
That one is a rich example of allegory.
I think there must be more than that though and it drives me insane trying to squeeze any meaning out of it.
Heh, always good for a cheap laugh. I myself read it as a comedy, with a touch of civil disobediance thrown in. Must have been my commie professors.
BTW, that begs yet another question, which may be worthy of its own thread…
I read it in my College Lit class, and it has stayed with me ever since – one of these days I have to read Moby Dick, though it is a little longer.
One key to understanding the story is to realize that all of the workers work at half-speed. One works only in the mornings, one works only in the afternoons and the boss works 1/2 speed all day.
Along comes Bartleby who works for X days straight, and doesn’t work X days straight. Even though he is the same, just with a different schedule, he is considered alien, as stated above. Even though the boss has some compassion, he still can’t prevent the eventual slide caused by Bartleby’s “difference.”
Well I was never one of those kids that acutally did the rading asigned to us, but I do remember the lectures on Melvile, and Hawthorne. From what I think when I glanced at the stroy, and from what my teacher told me Bartleby was about humanity. In the beginning the narrator was just a cold hearted laywer, but by the end he became warm and caring (sorta like a disney movie). After sending Bartleby to the insane asylum the narrator saw what soceity had done to Bartleby, and how society had groomed the narrator to react in a certain way towards people like Bartleby. Also that whole bit about the letter at the end shows that Bartleby was like a dead letter just shoved away and ignored when he needed to be delivered or helped. Its something like that I think, but I hated American Lit so I could be wrong. There are tons of other symbols is Bartleby as well, check out all the references to the color green, and try to make some sense out of the pyramid reference when Bartleby dies. Reading back on this post it makes absolutly no sense, oh well I always hated english. I’d be better with Young Goodman Brown.
It’s been a while, so I decided I’d better read it again before commenting.
So how’s this? Bartleby represents the nature of God. He doesn’t behave the way we want him to, and he cannot be moved by pleas, imprecations, reason or bribery. We may abandon him, yet he remains with us, inhabiting the stairwells of our consciousness. At the end, there are no answers to our many questions - God is essentially unknowable - there is only death.
Whaddya think? Yeah, well, I don’t think I came up with anything profound the first time I read it, either.
My analysis goes no deeper than appreciation for having been given the appropriate response every time my boss asks me to assume additional responsibilities.
Well, last year in Honors English, my teacher told us that Bartelby was really about Emerson and um…blanking on the name…the guy who wrote Walden… Henry David Thoreau. Anyway, Emerson promoted the Transcendentalist way of life, non-conformity, etc etc. Y’all know the spiel. Anyway, Herman Melville HATED the Transcedentalsts because they all wanted to be one with nature, and almost take it for granted that all men should live out amongst the trees and flowers and chirping birds. Melville felt that men must respect nature, especially after his time out on sea, and that Emerson had a pretty warped idea of what nature was. Melville also thought that Emerson and Thoreau were lazy bums, who did nothing but waste time and take up space.
He was particularly upset with Emerson, because he felt that Emerson had lead a rather intelligent young man (Thoreau) down the path of laziness. There was more to his bad feelings than this, but this was the gist. He had a strong and active dislike for the Transcedental way of life.
In “Bartelby…” the boss is Emerson, and with his acceptance and indecision, he allows Bartelby to do whatever he wants, or doesn’t want.
So, anyway, my English teacher told us that the gist was this. Bartelby was dependent on his boss, as was Thoreau dependent on Emerson. W/O the allowance and influence of Emerson and the boss, the other two wouldn’t be allowed to get away with what they did.
Sigh There’s more to it than this, according to my teacher, but it’s been awhile. I know this didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. Sorry.
Reading all these different interpretations I find myself laughing. For in my American Literature class my teacher told me that her interpretation was the correct one, the way Melvile intended the story to be read. However a lot of these interpretations make a lot more sense then the pile of horse crap that came out of her mouth. Which just proves what I knew throughout junior year, my english teacher was full of sh*t. 