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Essay on Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
The labor union movement of the late 1800s
Bartleby the scrievener melville interpretation
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He wanted people to think about injustice and inequality and to have the personal responsibility to stand up against them. Inequality throughout the book was resolved in a way similar to the French revolution, that is to say, it was a violent uprising. A different example of change is when Mahatma Gandhi wanted to free India from British rule and he took the responsibility to campaign for this using peaceful methods. Another example of an individual creating great change was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he gave his speech “I have a dream”. His methods, once again, were peaceful, and very effective.
The conflict of the era was big business, and its need to keep inflicting actions to keep a strong division of the wealthy, and the lower class workers, while maximizing profits and personal gain. As well as spotlighting the inequality of gender, race, and social status. This is paired with the stories of activists and everyday men who called for change in this pivotal time. The book is effective in using vivid imagery to explore scenarios of divide and disparity of the era.
The book describes incidents of the commoners being physically abused and mistreated. In one scenario, the colonists cruelly ignored the commoners' pleading requests for food although they were starving. "We begged Captain Smith for help, but he was engaged in a conversation with his officers' ', the book says. The commoners were forced to eat whatever they could find or scrape for food scraps (Page 47). This flagrant disregard for the commoners ' most basic necessities shows the seriousness of the abuse they experienced while living under communist rule.
The uprising that is shown in this book happens a lot today in the real world. All around the globe, people revolt against their country for peace and the want of freedom within their homeland. An example of this are the people in the middle east revolting against the emirs, which are monarchs running the region. On a daily basis, people are taking a stand against the strict governing system for a chance of freedom and privilege.
When only one gentleman shows up for the job, the boss gives the strange man, Bartleby, a job as a filer. After a few days, the new employee will not listen to the boss. This extraordinary man merely states, “I prefer not to,” when requested to complete a duty. Consequently, the boss gets weary of Bartleby’s behavior and attempts to get rid of
The book Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix is about a 1911 New York fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory that killed 146 immigrant workers, which followed a citywide strike led by the workers. In this writing piece, you will learn about three key elements to support labor, women’s rights and the importance of standing up for what you believe in from the three main characters: Bella, Yetta and Jane which all come from different social situations. Bella is an immigrant from Italy who is desperate to make money to send back to her family. Yetta is a Jewish refugee from Russia and Jane is from a very wealthy family but unhappy with her life because of the many restrictions her father imposes on her due to her support of the Triangle strike.
The late 19th century consisted of rigid work hours for children, the growth of strikes, and the use of yellow journalism. It was a challenging time for anyone below the upper class to live in. This is demonstrated throughout Newsies, a Broadway Musical displaying the challenges from this time period. Child labor, a major part of the movie, was the way of life and consisted of young children doing hard work as a vital part of the nation’s economy and income of families of the time. Another part of the movie, strikes, were the people’s way of refusing to work as a result of not getting their desires.
After reading Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener, I started to think about how the story is relevant to today. Melville is able to capture the tedious and repetitious work environment of people who work in offices not only through the description of the office, but also through the interactions of the workers. In the story, Bartleby is put in an office space without a view to the outside world. Instead the lawyer positions him facing the a wall. The wall symbolizes the class difference between the two men.
Moreover, with the rise of industries and the correlated wealth of their leaders, the pockets of the lower classes especially those of immigrants and farmers dwindled greatly. For example, in Document 2, Charles Loring Brace summarizes the lifestyle of the impoverished simply labeling their communities as “vagrant” and “idle” as these people drowned in “wretched rooms” completing “street-jobs” as a way to supply for their families. This portrayal of these people by Brace demonstrates the difficult life of a worker for even if they were able to come home with something, it was useless to their wellbeing. Ways of living such as those presented in Document 2, led to unions that fought to protect basic rights of those who were powerless such as the National Labor Union and Knights of Labor.
The book mainly talks about those radicals that have changed America. Talking about how Alice Paul and how she won fighting for women’s rights to vote. Spending eight years fighting to secure a suffrage amendment for women and next fifty years fighting to make women equal under the law. How Max Eastman left for Russia in 1922, he said he was going to find out if things he had been saying were true which took him twenty years to get an answer, how he supported socialism becoming a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance. John Reed, how he was honored by American communists and by the Soviets.
The society's standards of living life with old money and fighting alone was settled for Americans pulling them down no matter how hard they fought to gain that dream they visioned they couldn’t have passed it. Both authors show the reputation Americans wanted during 1920 through early 1930 which was brought on by following the society’s standards leading to the downfall of society
Bartleby supposedly worked from early morning to late at night, with no pause. All seemed to be going well for both employee and employer, until one day when asked to examine a paper, Bartleby replied that he, “would prefer not to” (page 155). The Lawyer was astonished; most likely because of the sudden change in behavior that his once diligent worker was exhibiting. Much time passed, and each attempt to get Bartleby to do his job was met with the same statement that he would prefer not to. The character of Bartleby is unlike any other in the story.
At the start of “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Bartleby already is miserable and unhappy. Though the narrator originally leads the reader to believe that this is because Bartleby works day and night with “...no pause for digestion” and hardly speaks to his co workers, it is because life has already worn him out (Melville 11). Just by working as “... a subordinate clerk inilarly to Mr.Wakefield, Bartleby has given up on being normal because being normal killed him
In “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, the workspace itself plays a pivotal role in the way the characters behave and interact with each other. The lawyer, who is also the narrator, describes his Wall Street chambers as having “windows that commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade…that for the benefit of all spectators was pushed up to within ten feet of my windowpanes” (105). This description of his chambers shows that the lawyer is located in an office space that has been totally cut off from nature and almost all living things; much like a prisoner when he is in solitary confinement. Once we get inside the office, we see that “ground-glass folding doors” (110) have divided the office into two parts,
Critical Analysis The short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville, showcases the protagonist, Bartleby, as a scrivener who is inundated with the demanding expectations of his job while being employed by an overbearing mercenary boss. Ultimately, Melville illustrates the protagonist’s sanity and moral value deteriorating as Bartleby begins to lose the will to live due to the stress that his job has created. Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York City, New York. He is the third child out of eight.
