Abstract This paper details the writing style of a paragraph within "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." It focuses on how the author uses a certain style to bring out character traits, storyline, and tone. It further examines how an author can use a dull character to tell an interesting story.
From the paper:
"'Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,' is perhaps one of the earliest and most potent satires of American corporate culture in the American literary canon. It tells the story of a scrivener. A scrivener is a law-copyist. This particular copyist named Bartleby infuriates his superiors by his refusal to work. Such a refusal is not only anathema to them, it confounds them. They attempt to fire him, but Bartleby refuses to leave his office. It is through his refusal to work, and to give no coherent reason for doing so other than he would prefer not to, that the entire system is shaken. This paper analyzes a paragraph of the short story and illustrates how the paragraph's language, its literary devices, and its tone expose the short story's central themes."
Abstract This paper offers a second diagnosis of Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener" and suggests that, in basic literary terms, it is the lawyer not Bartleby that is the dynamic character in the tale. Bartleby, the existential symbol, may collapse but only the lawyer can change.
From the Paper "Second, although standard definitions nominate the lawyer as the round, major, and dynamic character of Melville's tale of a law office, Bartley is equally round, as least with the limits of his illness, and he also changes in his deterioration. Technically, if he is not the major character, he is the essential character, dipped in that "power of blackness," the phrase Melville used in a review of "Mosses from an Old Manse" to praise Hawthorne."
