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This essay argues that "Bartleby" is central to understanding Melville’s life as a writer and, moreover, self-consciously presages Melville’s decision to give up writing as a career. The collection traces the changing nature of authorship, and tells "a history of print authorship in a set of author case studies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century."Įngel's chapter shows the extent to which Melville’s "Bartleby” (1853) is, among other things, a work of meta-fiction about the task of writing: it addresses head-on the strain between an author’s will and the reader’s expectations-and the high price paid for trying to create a new kind of audience. It is quite possible that the lawyer is an unreliable narrator, as any person narrating a story with himself in it is bound to embellish their kindness and limit their recollection of their downfalls.Professor Engel has contributed to the critical volume The Birth and Death of the Author: a Multi-authored History of Authorship in Print( Routledge, 2020). This is true, however, the lawyer’s appearance is from his own recollection of the story as it is narrated in first person. One rebuttal to my argument of the lawyer representing the bourgeoisie would be that the lawyer comes off as a kind-hearted individual who rarely shows signs of aggression or anger towards Bartleby.
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The lawyer uses ”old Adam” to mean the “sinful character of human nature” in reference to his aggression towards Bartleby (OED). The chief clerk even resorts to physical violence in a fit of rage to get Bartleby to cooperate “when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and … I grappled him and threw him”. The chief clerk does not worry about Gregor when he claims he is ill, but instead worries about the effects that Gregor’s illness this will have on his business “we businesspeople often … set aside some minor ailment, in the greater interest of our work” …show more content… Although not as outwardly demanding as the chief clerk, the lawyer attempts to have Bartleby obey his orders and gets frustrated when Bartleby replies with “I would prefer not to”. This shows how overworked Gregor is, never once has he taken a day off work due to illness, yet nonetheless the chief clerk shows up at his house demanding an explanation for his absence. While in bed, Gregor realizes he may not make it to his job on time and considers the idea of calling in sick due to his recent transformation “Then what if he called in sick? That would be rather embarrassing … because in the course of the past five years, Gregor hadn’t once been ill” (506). In the case of Gregor, the bourgeoisie would be represented by his boss, who pays a visit to him in at his home when he is late for work.
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In this way, Bartleby comes to represent the power of passive resistance against. However, his choice not to comply with the rules of the workplace could be viewed as a rebellion against Wall Street materialism. Passive Resistance: Bartleby is not a conventionally heroic character. The chief clerk and the lawyer represent the bourgeoisie, the upper class society who earn wealth at the expense of those below them. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. …show more content… Gregor and Bartleby are both proletarians in these stories, who belong to the working class. Gregor, the protagonist in “The Metamorphosis”, comes from a poor family, and is a working class man. Both of these stories end in the death of the protagonists, as these men are seen as unproductive and discarded by their capitalistic societies.
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Gregor and Bartleby alike are working class men who, through some turn of events, stop working and are deemed useless to those around them. The protagonists, Gregor and Bartleby, are examples of how the working class is treated when they do not conform to the conventions of capitalism. While Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the scrivener” and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” have unrelated plots, they both contain Marxist undertones that address alienation in the workplace as a result of capitalism.