Bartleby and Benito Cereno [Paperback]

Herman Melville (Author), Stanley Appelbaum (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1990

Two memorable and stirring works in one volume. "Bartleby," (also called "Bartleby the Scrivener") is a haunting moral allegory set in the business world of 19th-century New York. "Benito Cereno," a harrowing tale of slavery and revolt aboard a Spanish ship, is regarded by many as Melville's finest short story.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Herman Melville (1819 –1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), but after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications; Unabridged edition (July 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486264734
• ISBN-13: 978-0486264738
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > 19th Century
  • #3 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Classics
  • #21 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > General > Classics

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lawyer aids a scrivener who ends up in an asylum!, November 22, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Bartleby and Benito Cereno (Paperback)

Herman Melville spins a great tale that's easy to read. It's a story about five men, and the main character is just as much the narrator as it is Bartleby. The narrator is an attorney who hires three people to work for him, and each one is a real character. All the men are described in great detail, and they are terrific thumbnail character sketches that will stay in your memory bank for years to come! The last man employed is Bartleby, and he is really a strange duck! Bartleby is an excellent copier of legal documents, and initially he does a fine job. However, as the story progresses Barleby acts very strange. He responds with the words, "I'd prefer not to," when asked to proof-read manuscripts, and this response continues whenever the narrator, his boss, asks him perform the ususal office tasks such as going the the post office or doing small errands. The climax of the story comes when the narrator finds Bartleby in the law office getting dressed one Sunday morning. It appears that Bartleby is using the office for his lodging, and the narrator later comes across his personal belongings and shaving kit. As the story progresses, Bartleby does less and less work, and soon he's nothing more than a fixture in the law offices. When the narrator dismisses him and pays him a salary plus a tip, Bartlby refuses to leave. Finally, the narrator is about ready to go crazy -- the man won't leave. So, the narrator moves his law practice to another location and leaves Bartleby at the former work site. The end of the story describes Bartleby in the Tomb, and asylum. Rumor has it that Bartleby was once employed as a clerk in a Dead Letter Office, and this seems to explain his forlon state. Melville explains that a dead letter office is a terrible place to work; no doubt Bartleby was depressed being surrounded with letters that never made their intended destination. These letters could have contained money, promises, stories about weddings, happy tales written to people who failed to receive them. The symbolism in the story is interesting. Bartleby, like the narrator, live in a cold, impersonal world, set off by a series of walls and dark buildings. The symbol of walls without windows are the boundaries for the disconnected solitary work the five men face. Like hermits, each one rarely interacts with the other, and Melville shows the awful effects of a compartmentalized modern society. What would he think of Americans today who sit at computers and interact only by e-mail? What sad, solitary lives have we wrought? This story is rich with details, and I think you'll enjoy it!

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Haunting Stories from the American Master, October 15, 2000

By 

David Benioff (Otisville, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bartleby and Benito Cereno (Paperback)

I must respectfully disagree with the Boston reader who asserts that Bartleby is "a case study in clinical depression." That's definitely one way to interpret the story, but it defuses a great deal of the tale's power. If we believe that Bartleby is simply a victim of mental illness, we might begin to believe that if only doctors had Prozac in the 19th Century, poor old Bartleby would have chippered up and gone home dancing.

Bartleby's refusal, his famous "I prefer not to," seems more like a deliberate and sane NO. People did know what depression was back then (though it was generally called melancholia, instead). Bartleby's condition (our condition?) is something much deeper, much more terrifying-- the possibility that one can observe the world from a completely rational mind and decide that participation is not worth it.

If we decide that Bartleby's problem was depression, must we call Kurtz a paranoid schizophrenic? All of Beckett's characters could use a Xanax prescription, because they seem pretty bleak, too.

Bartleby is fascinating because of what we don't know; Melville is the great American exploiter of Negative Capability, Keats's term, defined as "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

It is because Melville is willing to refrain from that "irritable reaching after fact and reason" that Bartleby (and Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick) is a story that lingers in the imagination. If we knew why the man simply quit the business of life, if we knew it was a deficiency of chemicals in his brain or whatever, we would not be so haunted by his fate.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Psychological mysteries, March 9, 2001

By 

Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bartleby and Benito Cereno (Paperback)

These two tales are very different, but both of them are deep and acute penetrations into the human psyche. The first one, "Benito Cereno" is about a mutiny on board of a ship. This ship is navigating astray, off the coast of Chile (which is NOT in Central America, as other reviewers have embarrasingly said), when Captain Delano, an American sailor, observes it. He gets near the suspicious ship, gets on board of it, and finds an extremely tense and enigmatic situation. Wonderfully, Melville chose to describe the situation only through the senses of Captain Delano. As the narrator is not omniscient, we only know what Delano knows, so we understand his confusion and amazement at the strange facts he observes. We share his vacilations, speculations and changes of opinion before the disconcerting behavior of Captain Benito Cereno. This makes the reader stay interested all through the story, like he was there being part of it. The unexpected ending will solve the mystery, but only partially.

What's best about this story, even more than the smart plot, is the author's technique. He puts the reader right in the middle of the action. Just like in life, where we have no narrator telling us what the rest of the characters are doing "meanwhile". We only know what we learn from our senses, hopefully processed through reason.

The second tale, "Bartleby the scrivener" follows a technique similar to that of "Benito Cereno", but within a very different context and plot. It's narrated in first person by a good-hearted and charitable Wall Street lawyer (I guess times have changed)who hires a young and silent man as a copyist (that is, before Xerox, the guy who made manual copies of legal documents). Bartleby sets to do his work, copying page after page, but he refuses to do anything else, with the words: "I would rather not" as an answer to every order, instruction or request to do something. Tenaciously, Bartleby resists to any action. It's a pathological portrait of indifference and apathy, taken to the extreme. As in "Benito Cereno", we receive no additional explanations or background to his behavior. We are exactly where Bartleby's boss is: confounded. We are invited to witness a unique form of behavior and attitude towards life. The naration jumps continuously from drama to humor, with great fluidity and fine irony. Haunting and intriguing, this is a masterpiece of storytelling.