/ssrg/ Short Story Reading Group: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Will read this tomorrow, have a bump in the meantime

I am worried this will fail because lit doesn't actually want threads where they have to read something. I will try and join as many of these as I can.

Anyway I just finished this story and I found it very sad. It seemed like Bartelby realised that nothing in life is satisfying enough to choose over whatever is occurring in the present, and that there is nothing requiring him not to act accordingly. Pure fatalism. The first part is very funny though.

It outdid my expectations because knowing the author and not know what the word 'scrivener' meant I just assumed it was something to do with whales.

I read this a couple weeks ago.

I'm inclined to read Bartleby as a sort of proto-absurdist hero, he feels the pointlessness of existence but rather than try to fight it or otherwise save himself he chooses not to participate. His life is incredibly passive, even his resistance itself is simple a preference, not some resolute course of action. Refusing to eat is a pretty passive way to kill yourself as well.

I also though the mention of the dead letters at the very end had interesting implications.

The plot was very simple. The most enjoyable parts of the story were the prose and the characters.

What struck me as odd was how little is explained about Bartleby when the narrator hires him. I suppose it wouldn't be natural to delve into it before his nature became evident.

>I am worried this will fail because lit doesn't actually want threads where they have to read something
The copypasted encyclopedia entries about Melville at the top of the thread probably inclined most of the board to scroll past this thread.

Should I put them in a link in the future? I figured it would help people who aren't familiar with him but don't want to research him on their own.

Sorry if my analysis is more brief than last time, my phone is dying soon.

The 1st and 2nd halves of this story are extremely different. The 1st half was rather comical. The vivid description of the scriveners gave me a sensible chuckle. The second half, however, was more melancholy. Despite the story's simplistic plot, it was rather enjoyable.

At first, I thought Bartleby was "" special"", but towards the end its clear that he's special for a different reason. The lawyers represent the order in society as a whole, and Bartleby is an outlier. He knows the truth and is overwhelmed by it. He sees how cruel and demanding society can be and chooses not to take part, explaining his passiveness. The narrator sympathizes with the outlier and attempts to understand this struggle. His eyes are opening. When he explains Bartleby's odd behavior, the rest of society looks away and convicts the outlier, too scared to question their own lifestyle and would rather persecute someone else's because it's different.

Anyone able to find some literary criticism or essays published about this one? I'd be interested to read some analysis of it.

That would be the better choice if you want to attract more readers.

Almost 5 pages into it and it's really good so far. Im not that new to reading literature but i have to admit, i had to look up a lot of words haha.

I started and finished reading it yesterday without having seen this thread. I knew about it too but just never read it. I made a mistake because it was great.

I genuinely felt for Bartleby and understood him. Was it autism? I have it and it really stood out to me as Melville being ahead of his time. The routine, the dislike of change, the lack of motivation to do things you didn't want to, etc.

After Ivan Ilyich can we read The Pedersen Kid?

>i had to look up a lot of words
The best works are so.

I think we're followed the book posted in OP.

Should we branch out before finishing the book?

I feel like we should follow the book for now or at least stick to a vague chronology. We can read The Pedersen Kid when we get to the mid 20th century. I would certainly be up for some Gass. I'd also like to get some Alice Munro in here eventually. The only one of her I've read so far is To Reach Japan but it was sublime.

>He knows the truth and is overwhelmed by it. He sees how cruel and demanding society can be
Why do you say this. We know nothing of Bartlebys motivation or thinking except for "I would prefer not to". Him working dead letters is jsut a rumor, if he did i dont think he read the letters beofre burning them.

Can you and others provide examples for what you find funny, because i dont see it. The actions of the characters are more fascinating in weird way, wonderous and extraordinarily to me.

I think it's called being alive senpai

i love this story as the ultimate example of a peculiar sub-genre of literature about a narrator struggling to understand the behaviour of a weird fucking jerk.
in this genre it's essential that the narrator is relateable normal person who's entirely reasonable the whole way through, and the jerk is just a fucking jerk for no apparent reason although maybe they have their reasons? who fucking knows

i love these stories, the other ones that come to mind are

magda szabo: the door
amelie nothumb: the stranger next door

It may fail due to sheer rapidity.

Contrary to belief, not everyone here is gonna be able to read the short story posted every two days

everyone could if they wanted to

When Bartleby is first hired, he does nothing but copying. As time progressed, not only did he stop that too but he also loses his will to live. Notice the vacancy in his words, his actions and how he lives. When the police apprehend him, he doesn't even fight his impending doom. It's evident he's depressed enough to starve himself to death, but for reason unknown. The reason I said this is because it would fit in with the outlier trope, in that he sees things differently and chooses to remain passive

As for examples of comedy, most of the stuff I found funny is just my opinion.
>"Bartleby was not hot or spicy"
>Repetition of "I prefer not to" in first half
>Scriveners' differing opinions on Bartleby's behavior

Still i dont understand at what point Bartleby learns the truth and what that truth even is or how society is cruel or demanding.
When he stops his work it is a sign for learning truth? How? Could be many different reasons too. Seeing things differently doesn't make his views the truth. Society at large isnt even mentioned in the story. How is life in it cruel or demanding? Seems pretty easy and comfortable when you look at all the characters in the book. They dont have heavy or unsual work or societal norms imposed on them.
Can we even make non arbitrary and objective cases for why Bartleby act like this? I find it hard to do that.

I guess its just not my kind of humor. I find Bartleby's behavior more infuriating and becoming curious for his reasons, which don't become clear in the story.

It merely has to be a truth different from societies for it to be paralyzing. Not to all but to some, to those like Bartleby. Even when he is hired he is plainly different, occupies a different sort of sphere than the other clerks. As for what the truth is I think it is simply the pointlessness of it all. He knows in his bones what everyone else is trying to ignore or maybe simply doesn't feel in the same way he does, that we all end up as dead letters.

Metaphorically speaking, I mean. The legal firms in the building are society as a whole or a machine, you could say. When one gear turns the wrong way(the outlier), you get other gears who turn the wrong way(sympathizers) and pretty soon the machine malfunctions(change in society). I see where I'm wrong, in that Bartleby is just special and doesn't have all the answers. Nevertheless, those who act differently are treated differently, because people are afraid of the unfamiliar. I believe the story is a commentary on that.

Bartleby may or may not be real. It could be said the narrator makes up this ghost and puts him in the corner of the room as the manifestation of his apathy and ignored sense of mental/emotional malnourishment in his 'unambitious' and 'easiest' way of life. Or it could be said he's real and comes to be representative, maybe it doesn't matter. Anyways, the narrator shifts his feelings about this representative entity multiple times, unsure of acknowledging its implications in himself, and looks for the approval of his co-workers that the figures aspects are bad. Eventually he tries leaving Bartleby, but of course Bartleby comes back somehow, to the narrators great frustration. Eventually Bartleby dies, since what else is such an aspect meant to do? What he was lives on in the narrator.

And the epilogue is the narrator inventing his reasons for this character.

But that's not what happened. When Bartleby didn't adjust, the narrator gave him his sympathies up until he had no other choice. Society just moved around Bartleby since he refused to budge.

I don't think there is a meaning as to why the characters acted the way they did. It's a rather absurdist story.

I found some criticism of Bartleby. If anyone can find more, it would be most appreciated.

>A Guide to Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Steven T. Ryan
docdroid.net/FTPJRYC/a-companion-to-the-american-short-story-bartleby-the-scrivener.pdf.html

If this changes your view of the story, please share!

Sure, Gilles Deleuze wrote this about Bartleby's "formula:" research.uvu.edu/albrecht-crane/486R/bartleby_or_the_formula.pdf

My favorite essay on Bartleby, because I find too many others fall into the trap of reading their own preferred motivations into Bartleby's (non)actions.

agreed, they are short stories and you have what 2-3 days depending on the story. half hour tops.

Another failed iteration of this this thread. Are you done yet?

I have looked and never found a satisfying explanation of the story. Thank you for this user. This is the kind of shit I come to Veeky Forums for. Underrated btw

Holy hell the guy who wrote that is one of my lit professors at college. That's actually pretty neat.

Fuck you
You're doing good work OP, love you

>402 ▶
> (You)
>Fuck you

nice find

Halfway through, diggin it. Mostly because Melville is a prose god. Will give full opinions when I'm done

>I hate myself and want everyone else to feel bad too

boring

Can someone tell me what the Story of Adams and the Colt is all about, the story loses me a bit at this part, am i not recognizing a reference or something?

I would prefer not to

I don't but maybe there was a comparison between the characters in the story and the dead letters at the end. I see it as the first three characters, unique in their own way, had their thing about them that made life a little harder for the employer but he found them useful in his own way or he understood them, maybe they are like dead letters being sent to the post office, some had addresses hard to find but the letter had purpose. Bartleby was just one of those letters that had no origin, no address, just arrived at a destination waiting to be burned.

It could be depression, it could be that he saw the truth, whatever that may be, whatever it was he accepted it. I don't see how he was depressed, i got a sense of emotion when he spoke. What i was thinking is, what was he thinking or day dreaming about when he would stare upwards toward the wall, or when he was alone. A man who would copy legal documents out of nowhere just gave up and stopped wanting to do anything, what goes through his head?

i don't know im just guessing at this point, all i know is that it got depressing real fast. good story, cant wait for the next.

Read the Analysis part of this link, interesting in my opinion.

>From the beginning, the description of Bartleby is striking. He is a person who seems already dead: he is described alternately as one would describe a corpse or as one would describe a ghost. Pale from indoors work, motionless, without any expression or evidence of human passion in him at all, he is a man already beaten.

Even his famous statement of non-compliance, "I would prefer not to," is an act of exhaustion rather than active defiance. His success at getting away with his uncooperativeness comes from his very passivity, which seems to cast a spell over the narrator. It is not "I will not" but "I would prefer not," emphasizing that Bartleby is acting out of emotional response rather than some philosophical or ethical choice. Bartleby will detach from the world in stages, beginning with this first statement. With each time he reiterates the statement, he is renouncing one more piece of the world and its duties. The final renunciation will be of living itself, characteristically arrived at indirectly by the preference not to eat.

>gradesaver.com/bartleby-the-scrivener/study-guide/summary-of-pages-3-14

Movie

youtube.com/watch?v=yUBA_KR-VNU

why no "no, but ive read it in the past" option?

I haven't finished reading it yet but want to post anyway.

This is the third time I've read Bartleby and I'm not sure I'll ever know exactly what to make of it.

I do know however that the phrase "dead-wall reveries" will stick in my mind for a long long time

>Not having one of the options be "I would prefer not to"
Really dawg?

Man, this story is fucking good. Feels like Kafka with the descriptive acuity of Nabokov. Bartleby obvious but effective symbol (to me) for discordance in the incessant and reciprocal motion that defines modern city life; a breakdown in functionality, convention, and communication that emphasizes the inherent loneliness of the human soul when the trappings of perpetual action are stripped away

Should the dead letters be there? I feel like Bartleby's character is stronger as a mystery with as little of a past as possible.

Bartleby is a farce, a black mirror of the narrators' expectations from the wage labor system. What of these workers, these weakly men of flesh? He would gladly do away with them if he so chose. Only Bartleby does exactly what industrial capitalism wants of him. Please, Bartleby, do exactly as your told. If you would Bartleby find not your work strenuous or too much for your fickle spirit. For you know, the machines can do you in, if you've not become so machine-like yourself.

What happens to a machine when it is given incorrect input? It breaks, stutters and stalls, and so too does Bartleby, doomed to the last of his days sputtering black smoke in a prison yard.

not only incorrect, but also decadent and pedantic

But then what of the final paragraph of the story? What of the lawyer's ruminations on Bartleby's forlorn loneliness of spirit? He only engaged Bartleby as a good functionary briefly at the beginning of his employ, and from the first disinclination he tried to engage him on a human level repeatedly and fruitlessly

The last paragraph is vital to understanding the story and the nature of Bartleby as a character imo. He worked in a Dead Letters department, which entailed reading correspondence and connection between people who were ultimately dead and forgotten. This office was, as stated by narrator, promptly uprooted and replaced with another industry, as seems to be the spirit of the time, leaving Bartleby to search for a new function. It is likely that he saw in the missed connections of dead letters what is symptomatic of the rapidly industrializing America and Wall Street, increasingly becoming obsessed with motion and functionalism, and only accommodating of human spirit when it can graft itself onto this perpetual motion and become a mechanism of clockwork. Bartleby's decay is the decay of pure humanity, rent in two and unable to assimilate itself into the blind relentless progression of the generation of capital. Indeed he is tied inextricably to the narrator, who despite moving office to escape him, could not fully rid himself of Bartleby, because he sees in the scrivener a lugubrious pained echo of humanity drowning in the big square cistern of the office surrounded by brick walls

>defeated through physical force

What? When?

Guys it is repeated several times in the story that 'I would prefer not to' is not a mantra said out of defiance or insolence, but of exhaustion and weariness. I don't think Bartleby was 'asserting his freedom,' or anything so quotidian and characteristic of melodrama. He was a man who evidently could not adapt his spirit to the nature of the compartmentalized, bureaucratic, mechanical work that was asked of him. His rebellion was the inherent rebellion of the soul against streamlined industrial life

I absolutely agree. The last paragraphs were completely unnecessary.

Disagree. The dead letters office grounds the story and Bartleby in the contemplation of human disconnect and prevents him from being reductively considered as an absurdist symbol or, even worse, an analogy for depression

But to give voice to your inability to adapt to society instead of just forcing yourself is to be free.

Top notch

these short stories are just getting longer and longer

I normally wouldn't have included The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a short story, but it's in the book so I guess we'll go with it.

best analysis

it's all good, they're all great stories.

Bump

Deleuze's postface 'Bartleby ou la formule' but I'm not sure it's been translated from French. It's filled with assumptions and opinions on linguistics that I do not agree with but it's rather interesting on the whole

I think it would take on average only 20 minutes of reading a day to keep up.

underrated post

Is there a schedule for this? I'm keen to jump in but I'd rather know how much we are planning to read/day

See OP. Bartleby was from 12/28 through 1/2. Death of Ivan Ilyich is 1/3 through 1/8.

Final discussions of Bartleby. Anyone find more criticism to read?

I thought this was an improvement over the last story, and as I've read the next I know it to be good as well.

Get a head start on the next read: The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

English translation "Bartelby, or the Formula" was already posted in this thread,

Fartleby
:-)