Or that his genteel, self-interested interest in Bartleby is leading to no good. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Using documentary evidence of his experiences with lawyers and contracts, this essay concludes that “Bartleby” bespeaks a novel writing practice that impassively-yet resolutely-calls for a new standard of aesthetic, existential, and critical judgment. Irony : The Boss doesnt recognize that his own passiveness is as persistent and frustrating as Bartlebys. Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. The Lawyer begins by noting that he is an 'elderly man,' and that his profession has brought him 'into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men the law-copyists, or scriveners.' While the Lawyer knows many interesting stories of such scriveners, he bypasses them all in favor of telling the story of Bartleby, whom he finds. This essay argues that "Bartleby" is central to understanding Melville’s life as a writer and, moreover, self-consciously presages Melville’s decision to give up writing as a career. The classic tale of existential despair nnA Wall Street lawyer specializing in bonds and mortgages hires a respectable young man to copy legal documents. I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. The narrator of 'Bartleby the Scrivener' is the Lawyer, who runs a law practice on Wall Street in New York. The plot involves one mans difficulty in coping with his employees peculiar form of passive resistance. 'Bartleby the Scrivener' was written by Herman Melville in 1853 and was first published in Putnams Magazine in the November/December issue of that year. The collection traces the changing nature of authorship, and tells "a history of print authorship in a set of author case studies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century."Įngel's chapter shows the extent to which Melville’s "Bartleby” (1853) is, among other things, a work of meta-fiction about the task of writing: it addresses head-on the strain between an author’s will and the reader’s expectations-and the high price paid for trying to create a new kind of audience. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street Summary. Professor Engel has contributed to the critical volume The Birth and Death of the Author: a Multi-authored History of Authorship in Print( Routledge, 2020).
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