Bartleby, the Scrivener
By Herman Melville
- Release Date: 2013-01-22
- Genre: Short Stories
Score: 4
4
From 98 Ratings
We started this series with the intention to bring you what we call “the gems” of literature. It is a very subjective selection, of course, but we strive to bring you the best! The title we give you today is, as far as we know, a perfect example.
You all know Herman Melville for his world-famous, strongly courted by movies, white whale and the adventures of captain Ahab. Yes, that is Moby Dick. Kids & Hollywood see it as an adventure-packed sea story. Existentialists see it as a search for one’s purpose and the final confrontation with life. Ecologists, well, you can figure this one out by yourself… But there is another side to Melville’s writings, and this is the one that placed Melville in history as a forerunner of the absurdist literature (Kafka even named him explicitly as a main inspiration for his writings). This special writing is Bartleby, The Scrivener with the subtitle A Story of Wall-Street. It has actually nothing to do with Wall-Street (not the one we have today). It is the strange case of a scrivener that one day started to refuse any task he was given by simply and stubbornly stating that he “prefers not to”.
It is an amazing story and we prefer not to tell you more about it.
