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Bartleby The Scrivener

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Each person is different, each person thinks different and in a unique way. It is difficult to say how a person may be feeling or what difficult situations are happening in their life. The following short stories tell the story of two very similar-different characters. These characters live a similar but different story resulting in the same ending. In the story "Bartleby, the Scrivener", written by Herman Melville, Bartleby is a superficial and a little interesting character. On the other hand, in the story "Sorrowful Woman", written by Gail Godwin, there is a nameless woman who has characteristics similar to Bartleby, and that expresses her dissatisfaction for her life. In this analytical paper, an in-depth examination of these characters, …show more content…

It is not a person who likes to eat a lot, prefers to be involved in poetry and painting. Her interaction with her husband and son is very minimal. Write love notes about her husband and son. She sent them notes but she kept physically moving away from them. Here, Godwin writes, "the force of the two joyful notes slipped under her door that evening pressed her into the corner of the little room. She hardly had space to breathe. As soon as possible she drank the draft "(Meyer 43). This quote talks about what the psychological state of the woman might be like and how much she needs to escape from her every one. In reading, it can be also found that Bartleby 's life and that of the woman are very impersonal, but Bartleby 's is more since the woman, at least, the woman tries to communicate with her son and her husband in order to solve it is happening to her. An obvious difference between the woman and Bartleby is when she realizes that she was wrong, “What has happened to me, I’m not myself anymore.” (Pg. 40) This is represented when she hit the child because of his antics. Her husband tried to help her in many times; he hired a nanny. This made the wife feel freer for a little bit. She decided to fire the nanny and the husband had to be involved again, “He managed everything.”(Pg. 42) After that, the woman tried to catch any energy left from the nanny moving in her room. She seemed happier, but she isolated herself from her family. Before she died, she tried to be involved with her family. She did every housewife responsibility she could: cooking, cleaning, knitting sweater, writing love sonnets to her husband,

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A Literary Analysis of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville Question 1: Bartleby appears to be a man that is respectful in terms of his job performance and appearance in the narrator’s office. In fact, the narrator defines Bartleby as being “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!” (Melville para.15). This description defines a respectable and responsible man, but he also seems depressed and unwilling to do the bidding of his employer. In this manner, Bartleby does not seem like a lazy person, but a person that has become severely depressed in his refusal to work for his employer.

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“To this was added, for a time, the ‘shameful’ class, for which special regulations were drawn up ‘so that those who belong to it would always be separated from the others’’(Foucault 182) Bartleby, from “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” by Herman Melville, was a character of whom belonged to this ‘shameful’ class in which Foucault talks about in “The Means of Correct Training”. Foucault talks about the ‘system of honorary classification’ in which all of the characters within Bartleby abide by. These three classifications of people, above normal, normal, and below normal, all work in a certain dynamic to discipline each other into staying where they are.

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“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a short story by Herman Melville, tells the story of a scrivener's interactions in his daily life. Bartleby, a scrivener, portrays an outcast figure to society. He wants to rebel against the norm society has implanted as stereotypically correct. Throughout Bartleby’s stay at a law firm, the amount of effort put into his job diminishes. He can be characterized to represent capitalism, and the effects it has on society.

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I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:--I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of.

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