the Scrivener

Bartleby: The Scrivener by Herman Melville are imperfect. Humans have all felt pain, fear, insecurity, disappointment, and regret at some point in our lives; It is simply our nature to possess flaws. Perfection is an illusion, existing only in our minds. In truth, everything humans do in this life is an effort to correct our flaws, whether they realize this or not. We love one another and seek knowledge in an attempt to better ourselves. The Lawyer, who narrates Bartleby: the Scrivener, depicts…

The theme of isolation is dramatized because the story alludes that isolation can cause one’s demise or death. Bartleby, the antagonist isolates himself through his behavior due to his own reclusive silence and the screen that he hides behind throughout most of the story. The first step of isolation begins because the Lawyer himself places the screen between him in Bartleby. The story is written from The Lawyer's point of view which is isolating because the readers do not see Bartleby’s thoughts…

“Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall-Street” The story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall-Street”, by Herman Melville, published in 1853, introduces a narrator who is also a character in the story, and his existential emergence that is born due to Bartleby’s character. By examining two specific passages in detail and connecting those to the entire story, I will argue that the separation between privacy and society, demonstrated by the screen in the chamber, represents an internal…

The Many Allusions of Bartleby “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” is a complex story with many different components that contribute to its depth and meaning. One of the most important components would be the allusions, because they incorporate more subtle descriptions of the characters and allow the reader to interpret a whole other meaning to the story. The allusions within this story allow the reader to discover the deeper themes of isolation and corrupt American capitalism…

In the short film, Bartholomew’s Song, the directors, Lowell Frank and Destin Daniel Cretton, present viewers the idea of freedom of expression in a dystopian setting. The film depicts a man named Barth 467 in his daily routine within a laboratory facility. From the the first few minutes of the film Barth is shown doing the same actions as if he has a mindset of a robot. He awakes in a bland room, follows the other workers in a synchronized line, listens to a female animated voice for…

Throughout the short story of “Bartleby, The Scrivener” by Herman Melville, the narrator, or the lawyer, tells the reader how Bartleby’s continuous passive resistance behavior led to his tragic downfall. Although this story is an example of the downfall of passive resistant protests, it helps bring to mind of the effectiveness of it. This form of passive resistance has been a trend in protesting for the last hundred, or so, years. Ignoring the recent, by recent I mean the last eight years,…

In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scriviner,” I am most drawn to the way that problems compound through an individual’s passivity, which is the case for both the narrator and Bartleby. The narrator tries to escape or adapt to external circumstances, such as Bartleby himself, culminating in his switching offices, but the issue of Bartleby escalates through the narrator’s negligence in properly dealing with the initial situation. Bartleby, however, is more active in how he handles his…

Salvation and redemption is a concept that typically concerns eternal, spiritual deliverance from our sin. In the two stories “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Elephant”, the two narrators had led lives full of heinous wrongdoings and corruption and wished to redeem themselves, by “giving” to others. Instead of offering others true charity and sacrifice, they placed the highest value on items, and were overwhelmed by the hunger of gaining, instead of truly wanting to help those in need. By doing…

Herman Melville overcame an extensive amount of adversity throughout his life and this statement: “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation” defines the struggles he has dealt with such as the loss of his father at a young age, near collapse from mental exhaustion, and the criticism and failure that led to his depression and also the end of his literary career. Melville lived to be 72 years of age and lived in New York City. He wrote american literature in the mid 19th…

Zombies Yesterday, Zombies Tomorrow, Zombies Forever For every leading character in a story, there is something that acts against them. As with "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville and Zone One by Colson Whitehead, the main characters both face similar antagonists. Both set in New York City, these two pieces of literature share many parallels. But the biggest similarity they share is in the similarity in their antagonists characters. With both of these, the antagonist works to not only…