Bartleby, The Scrivener 'And The Legend Of Isolation'

In normal life, people will sometimes suffer from depression or sickness caused by the loss of a loved one in a romantic or family relationship. This has been a part of life for hundreds of years and it is a way that authors like Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Horacio Quiroga connect with people all throughout the world. Using exaggerated scenarios, these authors communicate how much of an impact isolation or abandonment can have on a person physically or mentally decaying.

The literary rebellion, known as realism, established itself in American writing as a direct response to the age of American romanticism’s sentimental and sensationalist prose. As the dominance of New England’s literary culture waned “a host of new writers appeared, among them Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, whose background and training, unlike those of the older generation they displaced, were middle-class and journalistic rather than genteel or academic” (McMichael 6). These authors moved from tales of local color fiction to realistic and truthful depictions of the complete panorama of American experience. They wrote about uniquely American subjects in a humorous and everyday

Gothic literature writers Poe, Irving, and Morgenstern wrote “The Raven”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Devil and Tom Walker”, and Night Circus. Morgenstern’s Night Circus shares one common gothic element of the supernatural, pain, or violence with each piece of gothic literature.

We can never be one hundred percent certain of the validity of our literary analyses. This is especially the case with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”. Critics have been trying for decades to make sense of the text and most will describe it as “inscrutable”. I don’t claim to know better than the critics, but instead offer my own interpretation of the work. Based on my observations and analysis, Melville’s use of many elements in his story—first and foremost the character of Bartleby, but also the dead letters, the many walls of Wall Street, and the state of Wall Street itself—works well to develop a sense of hopelessness, whether intentional or not, in the story as well as the narrator and consequently the reader. This

In the early 1800’s authors used many different authors used gothic elements to inform society the abject fear and fascination can propagate. Erin Morgenstern uses death, pain, blood, entrapment, and curses to illustrate her visions on trepidation and obsession in her novella †he Night Circus. Likewise, Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving used the same elements in there works such as Poe’s The Black Cat and Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker.

The study of American literature has changed a lot in the last twenty years. Teachers and professors have chosen to include more women and people of color as important authors in their curriculum. Some even disparage traditional American Lit courses for being filled with writing by "dead white men." While it is important to seek out and include overlooked American voices, the genius and importance of these five writers can't be lessened by this DWM stereotype.

To begin with, Bartleby is the protagonist of Melville’s story and he “was a scrivener, the strangest [one] ever saw” (3). He looks like a “cadaverously gentleman” (16), yet he wasn’t “ordinarily humane” (10). His physical appearance symbolizes the image of someone who exhibits emotional coldness and inhuman remoteness. In other words, he is alive but dead on the inside. Furthermore, another central symbol of the novel is the office. In this environment, restricted relationships among employees are evident. Hence, Bartleby appears as a prisoner of his own thoughts. He chose to isolate himself, despite having people around him. This demonstrates the lack of personal interactions in his work environment. The narrator, the employer of Bartleby, cares about the protagonist because he doesn’t want to feel guilty. He mentions that “befriend[ing] Bartleby will cost [him] little or nothing” while at the same time he can “lay up in [his] soul what would prove a sweet morsel for [his] conscience” (13). Moreover, this symbol of the office captures the essence of egoism. The narrator acts kindly towards Bartleby to soothe his conscience, not because a human being was mentally and physically in pain. Bartleby, judged on his corpse-like appearance and robotic actions, experienced apathetic responses that demonstrate how those around him never attempted to genuinely help him. Consequently, the lack of human compassion to help others demonstrates the inability to look consider the emotions of an individual that is

The development of American Literature, much like the development of the nation, began in earnest, springing from a Romantic ideology that honored individualism and visionary idealism. As the nation broke away from the traditions of European Romanticism, America forged its own unique romantic style that would resonate through future generations of literary works. Through periods of momentous change, the fundamentally Romantic nature of American literature held fast, a fact clearly demonstrated in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In an era of post-war disillusionment, when idealism succumbed to hedonistic materialism, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s romantically charged novel,

The southern gothic genre of literature can be described as “plots involving violence or hidden trauma, eccentric and often psychologically troubled characters, and an atmosphere of repression and decay” (Oxford Dictionary). This dark, depressing theme found in literature is one that highlights the harsh realities that characters face in their own geographic area. It is vital for southern gothic stories to incorporate the theme of some type of external decay. In the texts Salvage the Bones and Swamplandia! we can observe the struggles and consequences of simply where the characters find their lives to be located at.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. His parents were actors. After he was born, his father abandoned him and his mother died before he was three. This left Edgar Allan Poe a foster child. Poe 's father was an alcoholic and an insovent actor. Thus, Poe had a miserable life, starting with his childhood, he lost his parents since he was a little child, and I would say that affected his mind; he became focused on death, because of the effect of all those lost that he had, and his obsession with death and loss can be seen in most of his writing, we can see that most of his writing there are patters and

“[T]he American novel has usually seemed content to explore, rather than to appropriate and civilize, the remarkable and in some ways unexampled territories of life in the New World and to reflect its anomalies and dilemmas. It has not wanted to build an imperium but merely to discover a new place and a new state of mind.”

There is one known very influential writing style called Gothic Literature. It is not only considered to involve the horror or gothic element but is combined with romance, superstition, women in distress, omens, portents, vision and supernatural events to name a few (Beesly). The history and beginning of this era is not well known. From a few writers came this writing style that has impacted the world. A famous artists known for this type of writing is a man named Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote many short stories and poems that include horror, gothic, and romance just mentioned.

Many scholars maintain the opinion that William Blake is one of the most influential figures in the history of poetry and the visual arts during the Romantic Age. His work contains more aspects than just text, making it very unique in comparison to traditional poetry. Blake was a poet, painter, and printmaker: he produced watercolor paintings, engravings on copper plates, and sketches along with his poetry. In fact, Northrop Frye suggests that, “he is perhaps the finest gnomic artist in English literature.” 1 Due to the variation within his work, it is useful to study Blake through numerous critical approaches.2 Two specific approaches that can be applied to America are the Traditional approach and the Political, Colonial, and Post Colonial approach. It is impossible to understand America if it is approached solely from a traditional view. While traditionalists view the book’s themes as basic representations of frameworks, such as good and evil, the political approach allows readers to understand the true historical and social impact of the work.

Cultural critic Robert Berkhofer hints at this idea in characterizing a prevailing attitute among many white Americans at this time: "The quest for American cultural identity, the role of the United States in history, faith in the future greatness of the nation, and the fate of the Indian and the frontier in general were all seen as connected by the White Americans of the period." (Berkhofer, 92) In this search for identity issues of racial inequality and white encroachment and themes of death and destruction are necessarily implicated. This is no surprise considering the mid-nineteeth century social and political circumstances framing the writing and reception of Moby-Dick , particularly the Mexican War of 1848, the increase in American expansionism, and the divisions between slave and free states (Brodhead, 9). Although no doubt Melville was well-aware of these realities and of culturally-recurring images of ethnic peoples as "Noble," "romantic," or "enlightened savages" (Berkhofer, 78), his unconventional depiction of Queequeg seems to defy neat compartmentalization into such existing categories.

Melville assigns Bartleby a corner of the room with a grim view and a high green folding screen, separating the two. To any and all questions brought to him, he either remains silent or says those five words with an absence of tone, in a somewhat inhumane way with no emotion and a straight face almost “cadaverous.” The narrator attempts to know the origins of this interesting creature and even finds him living in the office still possessing such a “cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance” (54). The narrator gives an eerie vision of Bartleby as a corpse, which brings about not only sympathy but also fear. Although Bartleby is alive, he has certain undead qualities about him.