Herman Melville's Philosophy Of Transcendentalism In Bartleby, The Scrivener

Bartleby, The Scrivener Herman Melville, the author of Bartleby, The Scrivener, was born in 1819 and published his novella in 1853 (Biography.com Editors). In his novella, a successful lawyer of Wall Street hires a scrivener, named Bartleby, who begins the story as a very good worker, and then he declines to work by saying “I’d prefer not to” to the commands given to him. After Bartleby refuses to leave his firm, The Lawyer moves his firm to a different location to abandon Bartleby, who is arrested

Transcendentalists began, in the 19th Century, to weave a new form of writing using philosophy as the `vehicle of thought' . While this allowed them to explore new and untouched areas in the mind, it also greatly influenced many later writers from Henry Thoreau to the more `popular' and recent Mark Twain. Let us begin with

Transcendentalism: The Light That We Cannot See “Transcendentalism […] has primarily much the position of the sun […] We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion […] But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard” (Chesterton, 24). These words encapsulate the driving rationale of the anti-transcendentalist argument – that although individuals seek transcendentalism, they can never truly realize it, or,