Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener Annotated

Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Annotated Bibliography: The relationship of Bartleby and the narrator in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby the Scrivener." From The Bedford Anthology of American

Literature, Volume One: Beginnings to 1865. Edited by Susan Belasco and Linck

Johnson. Published by Macmillan, 2007. Full-text version of Melville's famous short story. Contains brief biography of the author along with primary source depicting the conflict between an employee and his employer. Also contains useful examples of Melville's contemporaries' writings from the 19th century period.

Norman, Liane. "Bartleby and the Reader." The New England Quarterly. 44. 1 (Mar., 1971):

This article examines the degree to which the reader is placed in the position of the Lawyer by Melville, and to which the Lawyer is presented ironically. Examines the rhetorical use of compulsion through language (such as the use of the word 'prefer' which the lawyer tries to make Bartleby stop using) and inaction. Debates ambiguity of a 'frustrating' story and subject, and the degree to which Bartleby is admirable or not in the eyes of Melville, the reader, versus the Lawyer's perspective. Interesting use of 'reader-response' criticism in relation to the story. Examines power dynamic of relationship and how Melville's language highlights this.

Pinsker, Sanford. "Bartleby the Scrivener': Language as Wall." College Literature. 2. 1

(Winter, 1975): 17-27. Analyzes how the Lawyer's language is inflated, and he strives to control the world rhetorically. Bartleby, in contrast to the lawyer is a blank wall, utterly unknowable. The power of silence: by refusing to be understood, Bartleby attains the only power he has in the world. Examines relationship between the two men as a war of language.

Springer, Norman. "Bartleby and the Terror of Limitation." PMLA. 80. 4 (Sep., 1965): 410-418.

Springer argues that the most fascinating aspect of the story is not Bartleby, but the narrator. The narrator's terrifying certainty that he knows what is right is what makes Bartleby's inaction seem so subversive. Utterly insensitive, the narrator is looking for person on whom he can unleash his anger and desire to control others. The story is about a relationship, not just the fact Bartleby does not 'care' to work.

Thompson, Graham. "Dead letters!....Dead men?': The rhetoric of the office in Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'. " Journal of American Studies 3-34.(2000): 395-411. Thompson analyzes the relationship between Bartleby and the unnamed narrator as a kind of a romance. Why is the narrator compelled to tell the story of Bartleby, long after it happened? Telling the story becomes a way of 'having' Bartleby and possessing him, the way the narrator cannot in life.

Weinstock., Jeffrey Andrew. "Doing justice to Bartleby." American Transcendental Quarterly

17.1 (2003): 23-42, 55. Weinstock analyzes Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a kind of postmodern mystery story. Bartleby's reasons are always enigmatic, and the frame tale, that of a 'dead letter' office with an anonymous narrator, intensifies this sense of meaninglessness of life. "The conclusion (or lack thereof) of 'Bartleby' points to the unsettling realization that every letter is potentially a 'dead letter'-that, as famously proposed by Jacques Derrida, a letter can always not arrive at its destination. Meaning can always go astray. If this is an inherent possibility of language, then "Bartleby" finally raises the question of what it means for meaning to arrive-of what it in fact means for something to mean at all." Bartleby is frightening to the narrator because he highlights the meaninglessness of work, something the narrator believes in.