Bartleby and Akaky: A Struggle against Social Tide
Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of all-street is a story reminiscent of the emergence of nineteenth century white-collar working class in most cities in the United States and specifically New York. Melville paints a picture of "Bartleby" a tragi-comic fable about a passive man, invisible to the society and who responds to his condition in the most unusual way leading to his death. It is important to note that this story was written at the height of labor activism when the all Street was the center of Political debates on workers' rights amid growing labor movements. Similarly, Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Russia characterized by challenges of transition from feudal society to a modern society with the advent of industrialization. The author paints a picture of an individual engulfed by the absurdities of life as a result of…...

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Work Cited

Gogol, Nikolai. The Overcoat . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 .

Melville, Herman. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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Bartleby's physical appearance -- his pale visage, his lean form, his tattered clothing and his "flute-like" voice -- conveys a man who is like the living dead. Indeed, the narrator discovers that Bartleby has been sleeping in the office. Bartleby is like a man who is haunting the building. He only speaks when he is summoned; he has no discernible emotional reactions, and he floats around the office as if he is not even there. Bartleby is more of a "fixture" than a human being. Death is alluded to not only in Bartleby's own physical nature but also in the office itself, with its "dead brick wall" that match the "dead-wall reveries" of his mind.

Bartleby's ghostly form shows that he does not take pleasure in life; he does not eat or drink or even go for walks. He barely speaks with other people. The narrator ultimately understands that it is…...

Melville
Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" describes the drudgery of daily life in an office. The reader learns about the title scrivener from a well-meaning, good-natured lawyer who hires Bartleby to help in the office alongside his relatively ineffective scribes Nippers and Turkey. At first, Bartleby seems a good fit in spite of his dour demeanor. As time passes, Bartleby loses all motivation to work. He starts to refuse to work completely, as he sinks deeper and deeper into a depression. The narrator reaches out to Bartleby but only in superficial ways, never managing to penetrate the real underlying reasons for Bartleby's funk. Bartleby's death sparks in the narrator a deep sympathy for the plight of humanity. He calls out for "hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities."

With the story of Bartleby the scrivener, Melville addresses a broad range of…...

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Reference

"Melville, Herman." (n.d.). Retrieved online:  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/bb/hm_bio.html

Abstract
Engaging in a Bartleby, the Scrivener analysis essay is bound to test one’s patience. It is one of the most inscrutable works of Herman Melville. While Melville is perhaps most famous for his nautical adventure tales, this paper delves into the enigmatic cogs and wheels that make this short story a piece of eternal literature. Eternal literature transcends the constraints of time and relatability, touching upon themes and symbols that are indelible to human existence. This paper summarizes the major events of the short story, briefly addresses the main characters, and examines the more predominant themes.



Introduction

Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville is one of his most elusive and compelling short-stories, one that most critics deem to be his ultimate masterpiece. One of the main reasons that critics herald it as such a masterpiece is because it can be interpreted in so many ways—as a supernatural tale, as a psychological projection,…...

Franklin's autobiography demonstrates a truly American kind of businessman, because he so neatly embodies all of the assumptions and logical fallacies that American capitalism depends on in order to justify its dominance in an ostensibly equitable and representative society.
Where Franklin's autobiography demonstrates the peculiar appeal to divine right that is used to justify the inequity of American capitalism, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener demonstrates the almost willful obtuseness necessary for any apologists of capitalism who must interact with the exploited lower classes on a regular basis. The narrator of Bartleby the Scrivener is entirely unaware of anything outside the extremely limited range of his own preconceived ideas, which is both why Bartleby's passive resistance stuns him so much and he is ultimately unable to come to terms with Bartleby's death. He practically admits as much when he says "the easiest way of life is the best," because the easiest…...

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References

Franklin, B. (2008). Autobiography of benjamin franklin. New York: Forgotten Books.

Melville, H. (1856). Bartleby the scrivener. New York: Plain Label Books.

illa Cather and Herman Melville both explore themes of psychological and social isolation in their short stories. In Cather's "Paul's Case," the title character is a vibrant young man whose passion and creativity is constrained by his pitiful life in Pittsburgh, where his only solace is his work as an usher. Melville's protagonist Bartleby in "Bartleby the Scrivener" lacks the joie du vivre that Paul possesses. However, both of these protagonists plummet toward death as the only foreseeable relief from the terrible injunction of life. Their approaches to death are different, though. Bartleby is wholly unlike the young Paul, who feels regret the instant he realizes the "folly of his haste," (Cather para 65). On the contrary, the senior Bartleby remains fully resigned to self-abnegation throughout his adult life. hereas Paul believes that if he only had money, he could be free from the clutches of his past and embrace…...

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Works Cited

Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case." Retrieved online:  http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Cather/Pauls-Case.htm 

Freud, Sigmund. "Part Two: The Dream." Retrieved online:  http://www.bartleby.com/283/10.html 

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby the Scrivener." Retrieved online:  http://www.bartleby.com/129/ 

Skelton, John. "Death and Dying in Literature." Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. Vol 9, 2003, pp. 211-217

Therefore, both characters failed to have positive reviews from their employer; yet, by compensation, they managed to remain employed. The discrepancy between the assignments they were paid to manage and the actual results in fact will weight more by comparison to the amount of work Bartleby would be able to achieve up to a certain point. Therefore, it can be said that one of the first characterizations of the main character is provided through the comparative characterization of the other two important characters.
As per the narrator, "a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now -- pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby" (Melville, 2013). Aside from the brief description when introducing the character of Bartleby, the narrator points out that "I engaged him, glad to have among my corps of…...

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Reference

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street." 2013. Available online at  http://www.bartleby.com/129/

It is recommended that the oss should tell artleby to begin acting more responsibly or he will be forced to leave. (Melville, 2006)
Exactly why does artleby always "prefer not to?" Describe artleby's behavior. Why can't he make friends or communicate? What is at the heart of his rebellion?

artleby does not want to work or doing anything that will allow him to take control of his life. The best way to describe this individual is dysfunctional and it is obvious that he may suffer from some kind of mental disorder. The reason why he refuses to make friends as well as communicate is because; he becomes more withdrawn and delusional in the story. The heart of his rebellion is his desire to do nothing and live off of what others have achieved in their lives. (Melville, 2006)

Are there any ironies in the story that you could point out? Are there…...

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Bibliography

Bartleby the Scrivener. (2011). Spark Notes. Retrieved from:  http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/melvillestories/section1.html 

Melville, H. (2006). Bartleby the Scrivener. Melbourne: Objective Systems.

Whitman uses simile effectively ("The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings") and uses metaphors effectively to link himself with others that have crossed the river in the past ("The dark threw its patches down upon me also…") because he certainly wasn't and isn't perfect at all so he had a metaphor for that ("I too knitted the old knot of contrariety…"). Melville's narrator, whose work is brilliant but a bit tedious, can slip personification, a metaphor and a simile into the same sentence for effect. For example, talking about Turkey, a previous employee ("a temperate young man") the narrator explains that "…nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless." Melville's narrator seems to have an obsession to either understand Bartleby, or at least be able to rationalize…...

Melville and rving
The dawn of the American nation brought with it a need for a decidedly American culture, one depicted with careful precision by many of the authors that came to paint the literary landscape of the new magnate across the Atlantic. Washington rving, the first American great, told the story of the nascent, colonial United States through youthful folklore limned with great detail and attention to the inner workings of the human spirit in its new land. Half a century later, Herman Melville entranced the same people with his swashbuckling narration of pirates, whales, and sailors; America's best, who, against all odds, battled sea, spray, and monster to find their way back home. While Melville declared his preference for creative genius over adept imitators like rving, he could not escape rving's influence, from which he learned that realistic details of rural life in American can be worked memorably into…...

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Ibid, p. 23.

Irving, Washington. Rip Van Winkle. New York: Black Dome Press, 2003.

Ibid.

The narrator becomes repulsed by Bartleby and decides that he must be suffering from some type of mental problem. The less the narrator knows about Bartleby the worse things seem to be for him. He wants to make sense of things. He wants it all to make sense. The conflict arises from his inability to do so. The narrator is simply being human in his desire to control and understand things but Kafka is demonstrating how we cannot always know everything and how we must be at peace with that, lest we become insane. It is also important to point out that some things are simply not meant to be known or completely understood. Kafka does not attempt to explain everything in this story because we often face situations that will never be truly understood.
Marquez demonstrates conflict and how it makes for interesting fiction by allowing the readers to…...

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Works Cited

Kafka, Franz. "The Metamorphosis." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction R.V. Cassill, ed.

New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1981.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Collected Novellas. New York:

Harper Perennial. 1990.

Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" also uses a heightened situation to illustrate a greater human truth. In realistic terms, Bartleby's refusal to work is absurd, at least to the lengths which the title character carries his impulse to "prefer not" to do anything. Also, the level of bureaucratic intransigence of Bartleby's colleagues also seems ridiculous, as they obsess over their fellow worker's refusal to endorse the practices of their offices by toiling away and useless endeavors. But Bartleby's tale illustrates the soul-crushing nature of modern life, and the purposeless of much of the paperwork that human beings are forced to plow through, simply to make a living. Bartleby wants out of the 'rat race,' and by seeing Bartleby's reaction, and the reaction of others to Bartleby's denial of the value of work and government regulation, the reader is able to see the more muted, but still absurd truths of his…...

American Literature
Listen to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God preached. Discuss in the discussion group.

Jonathan Edwards gives us a perfect example of the Calvinist beliefs of the Puritan settlers in early New England. Edwards studied theology at Yale University -- where today there is still a dormitory named after him -- but then became a noteworthy preacher in the Great Awakening, which exhorted an entire generation to renew their Christian faith. Edwards' skill in preaching lies in using literary imagery to get across abstract theological concepts. Calvinist theology believes in "total depravity" -- in other words, because of Adam and Eve eating the apple, human beings are fallen, and stained with "original sin." The most memorable image in Edwards' sermon -- the image of the spider being held over a fiery pit -- is meant to be a metaphor to enable the listener to imagine how God feels…...

American Constitution: A living, evolving document -- from guaranteeing the right to enslavement in the 18th century to modifications in favor of freedom in the 19th century
Constitution today protects the rights of all in its language, but this was not always the case in its text and spirit. As a political tactic as well as out of personal conviction and experience, Frederick Douglass' characterization of the American Constitution as an anti-slavery document is certainly an admirable piece of rhetoric. Douglass stated that although the America he spoke to at the time of his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom, was a nation divided between free and slave states and territories, fundamentally America was and "is in its letter and spirit, an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence" (396)

Slavery, Douglass stated, deprives an individual of his or her dignity, deprives an individual…...

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Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Available in full text online at   new2?id=DouMybo.sgm& images=images/modeng& data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed& tag=public& part=6& division=div2[29 Jan 2005].http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer 

Lincoln, Abraham. "First Inaugural Address: Monday, March 4, 1861." From Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S.G.P.O.: for sale by the Supt. Of Docs, U.S.G.P.O., 1989. Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/124/. [29 Jan 2005].

Madison, James. "Federalist No. 10." The Federalist Papers. Available in full text online (  [29 Jan 2005].http://www.thisnation.com/library/books/federalist/10.html )

"The United States Constitution." Available in full text online   [29 Jan 2005].http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html .

Kafka's the Metamorphosis
Question # 3.) In this topic, discuss the symbolism in Kafka's "Metamorphosis." For instance, one of the most important images is the window and its relationship to Gregor's vision. There are also other equally important symbols too, like music, furniture, the apple, and Gregor's insect body. In this topic, analyze how Kafka uses symbolic objects and images to convey Gregor's pain and suffering. You can also connect Kafka's story to Bartleby or Gogol's "Overcoat." Just make sure that you should focus on Kafka's story and incorporate quotes from Kafka to illustrate your point.

Within the canon of classic Western literature, there have been few works of fiction which have inspired as much critical debate as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Originally written in 1912 and published in his native German in 1915, Kafka's masterpiece presents the curious dilemma of Gregor Samsa, a young man who readers learn in the…...