Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno (Cliffs Notes) [Paperback]

Mary Ellen Snodgrass (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cliffs Notes | Publication Date: July 15, 1992

These two longer short stories deal with men in commerce on Wall Street and men at sea, both involved in struggles for power and the creation of a livable ethic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

(in full Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street) Short story by Herman Melville, published anonymously in 1853 in Putnam's Monthly Magazine. It was collected in his 1856 volume The Piazza Tales. Melville wrote "Bartleby" at a time when his career seemed to be in ruins, and the story reflects his pessimism. The narrator, a successful Wall Street lawyer, hires a scrivener named Bartleby to copy legal documents. Though Bartleby is initially a hard worker, one day, when asked to proofread, he responds, "I would prefer not to." As time progresses, Bartleby increasingly "prefers not to" do anything asked of him. Eventually he dies of self-neglect, refusing offers of help, while jailed for vagrancy. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. At eighteen he set sail on a whaler, and upon his return, wrote a series of bestselling adventure novels based on his travels, including Typee and Omoo, which made him famous. Starting with Moby-Dick in 1851, however, his increasingly complex and challenging work drew more and more negative criticism, until 1857 when, after his collection Piazza Tales (which included Bartleby the Scrivener), and the novel The Confidence Man, Melville stopped publishing fiction. He drifted into obscurity, writing poetry and working for the Customs House in New York City, until his death in 1891. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 40 pages
• Publisher: Cliffs Notes; Cliff's Notes edition (July 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822002205
• ISBN-13: 978-0822002208
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,748,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seemingly simple story about the choices we make daily, March 23, 2002

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (Hardcover)

Herman Melville wrote this story in 1853, two years after Moby Dick had been published and his writing career was beginning to lose its luster. Subtitled, "A Story of Wall Street", it is a seemingly simple story about a lawyer who hires a gentleman named Bartleby as a scrivener in his office. This was way back in the days before photocopy machines and scriveners performed the necessary tasks of tediously hand copying documents over and over. Bartleby was good at the copying part of his job, but when asked to proofread aloud one day he simply replied, "I prefer not to." From that moment forward, he used the phrase "I prefer not to" for every task requested of him, eventually "preferring not to" do any work whatsoever. The lawyer, who is astounded by Bartleby's attitude, tells the story in the first person.

The story is rich in language and yet spare in actual action. The reader is forced to think, and think seriously about the choices we make daily. Bartleby chose to rebel and become an anti-hero. But the real protagonist of the story is the lawyer, who is drawn into Bartleby's power and grows to admire him. The conclusion is sad, but inevitable. Recommended.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Imagine yourself in the Dead Letter Office, November 28, 1999

By 

Simon (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno (Cliffs Notes) (Paperback)

The story of Bartleby is simply about a man loosing his will to live. It is intended to show the reader a dark side in all of us when the meaning of our existence is allowed to be challenged. The chilling image of Bartleby in his previous job at the Dead Letter Office leaves my imagination running wild, wondering about the contents of the letters and how Bartleby must have gone from concern to sadness to indifference about his own mortality as he read the messages written to those who can no longer receive them. I'm glad Melville left Bartleby's reason for being (or not being) a mystery. This way, any reader can relate to the story by drawing on their own experience.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Literary Innovation: the Clueless Narrator, January 22, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bartleby The Scrivener A Story of Wall-Street (Paperback)

"Bartleby" is strictly speaking just a magazine sketch, one of a batch of informal sketches from magazines reprinted together as The Piazza Tales. It has the format of a memoir of an eccentric character, Bartleby, as told by a nameless first-person narrator, "an eminently safe man" by his own account, a lawyer who earns his living through the most mundane, routine legal paperwork, who also complains that 'reformers' have deprived him of his lucrative sinecure in state government. "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has ben filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best," he says of himself. In short, in this "Story of Wall Street", he is a drone, a financial parasite, and he would have been recognized as such by Melville's readership in the 1850s, a era when Wall Street was regarded with as much suspicious as in 2009. He is also a smug, sanctimonious, cautious man, irritably comfortable to exploit the labor of his copyists, one of whom is an impaired alcoholic and the other perhaps a pre-medication psychotic. When the third impaired eccentric, Bartleby, joins the staff, our Narrator is readily 'generous' in tolerating him as long as he can make a dime. It seems to me fairly obvious that we readers are supposed to treat the Narrator with distrust, perhaps even dislike.

Melville wrote at the beginning of the now-established literary tradition of the 'unreliable narrator', supplanting the omniscient narrator of the majority of 19th C novels. But Melville transcends that tradition in his first effort, giving us a 'clueless' narrator, an observer who is honest only in his acknowledgement of his complete non-understanding of his subject. To accept the Narrator's analysis of Bartleby would be a fatal error of readerly judgement. Whatever Melville's subtext in this story -- whatever Melville wants to tell us -- that Narrator is the one person who can't possibly be expected to comprehend it.

Melville also wrote at the end of the ancient tradition of 'allegory.' His only literary peer and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was the grand master of slyly allegorical short tales, and it makes sense to examine Bartleby as a specimen of the allegorical genre. Thus we need to ask who the Narrator figures for, and who the Scrivener, and then what it is, really, that Bartleby "prefers" not to participate in. My interpretation is that N represents the entire commercial/financial culture of 19th C America, while Bartleby embodies all those who are aliens within that system, first by necessity and then by bitter choice. Bartleby, in effect, prefers not to be a link in that chain, a cog in that machine.

Another school of literary criticism would examine Melville's personal life for clues of his authorial intentions. It's widely known that Melville was finding his inability to "make a decent living and support his family" both frustrating and frightening during the decade after the commercial failure of Moby Dick. In fact, Melville found himself on the verge of becoming a patronage drone, a place-holder in the New York Customs Office. It may be important to realize that Melville's father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, was both an extremely powerful man in America at the time, and a man of energetic personal forcefulness. It's hard to believe that Melville was not intimidated and oppressed by Shaw, yet no more able to make a case for himself than poor Bartleby.

I'm just tossing off suggestions here, my friends. Bartleby is an enigma wrapped in complexity, and no final interpretation would stand up to a second reading. When I first read it, in the 1960s, it was still neglected and overshadowed among Melville's works by "Billy Budd". It's been interesting to watch the emergence of recognition among readers that Bartleby is one of the greatest short masterpieces of the English language.

One thing more to say about Bartleby is that it's marvelously funny. It's Herman Melville's best assimiliation of the ludricrous style of Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers. The first dozen pages, before the appearance of Bartleby, are devoted to comedy in the form of exaggerated portrayals of the three hapless employees of the nameless narrator. Each of these comic-relief figures will be brought back into service at intervals in the subsequent tale. It's supremely important, dear reader, to recognize Melville's sardonic humor; other reviewers who rated Bartleby at two stars or less clearly "didn't get the joke."