Bartleby, the Scrivener Melville, Herman | Graham Nicol Forst (essay date 1987)
Graham Nicol Forst (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: "Up Wall Street towards Broadway: The Narrator's Pilgrimage in Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer, 1987, pp. 263-70.
[In the following essay, Forst contends that "Bartleby, the Scrivener" records a spiritual awakening undergone by the narrator. ]
"No materials exist," says Bartleby's worldly employer, for "a full and satisfactory biography of this man."
For nothing is ever "ascertainable" about such men, except what our own "astonished eyes" tell us. Perhaps such men hardly "exist" except deep in our mythic imaginations where, as archetypes, they rest, until their presence is urged forth by the call of touching, sympathetic imaginations, Coleridge's, Melville's, Conrad's. Or the writers of Isaiah, or the Gospels.
But the surprising thing is not that we should discover such a mythic presence in this character—after...
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