So, although Bartleby can see other human beings and they can see him through the cracks in the walls, the walls themselves serve to disconnect and isolate these felons from each other, much how the walls in The Lawyer’s office separated Bartleby from the other employees and The Lawyer himself. Although he is alone in this huge yard, which would itself serve as a symbol of disconnected isolation, The Lawyer notes (when he visits Bartleby) that he can see the eyes of all the thieves and murderers who are locked away in their cells peering down on Bartleby. – Wall Street.” By keeping the office address vague, the office itself comes to stand in for all of Wall Street, implying that the disconnection apparent in The Lawyer’s office is in fact characteristic of the entirety of New York’s business sector.īy the story’s end, walls take on an even more menacing quality, as when Bartleby is shipped off to prison, he is held not in a cell, but in the courtyard in the prison’s very center, surrounded by walls of extreme thickness. The office’s address is never actually written out in the story instead it is always written in the format “No. Not only that, but the spot where The Lawyer stations Bartleby has a window that used to look out onto back yards, but now, because of the construction of new buildings, the window only looks out onto a brick wall.īeyond the office’s layout, the very name of the street on which the office is located, Wall Street, symbolizes the disconnected isolation within. When Bartleby is hired, The Lawyer places him inside his own office, but he installs a “folding screen” (basically a temporary wall) so that The Lawyer cannot see Bartleby and Bartleby cannot see him.
The narrator, who is a lawyer, analyses the workers around him and becomes focused and intrigued by one of the many workers, Bartleby. The Lawyer’s office is separated into two rooms by a ground-glass folding door: one room where The Lawyer works and one in which his scriveners work. Bartleby the scrivener is a story by Herman Melville which takes place at a small office on wall-street. In this excerpt from Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street, a lawyer.
Walls serve to create boundaries, and they disconnect people throughout the narrative of Bartleby, the Scrivener. Melvilles writing often explored aspects of philosophy and American society.
0 kommentar(er)
