/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13378805]

Just finished reading Bartleby.
What was his problem after all?

[Anonymous No.13379430]

bump

[Anonymous No.13380176]

Bartleby dindu nuffin. The problem was with all those douchebags not accepting his rejection of life and trying to make him work and shit.

[Anonymous No.13380178]

No joke, I wonder if Bartleby isn't supposed to be autistic. His behavior tracks really well with somebody who has the 'tism.

[Anonymous No.13380213]

Bartleby is the great denier of modern society. Take part in your drudgery, your division of labor, your endless paperwork, your whole bourgeois existence? I’d prefer not to

[Anonymous No.13380228]

>>13378805
His problem was those annoying fucks impeding on his personal sovereignty

[Anonymous No.13380280]

>>13380213
This - he wasn't insane, he was the only one seeing things clearly, and consciously chose a quick(ish) death by starvation over the slow death of wage-slavery.

[Anonymous No.13380292]

>>13378805
He preferred not to.

[Anonymous No.13380303]

>>13378805
Bartleby is a static character with no real inner traits. The whole point is to ask, how would people react if their tricks just didn't work?

[Anonymous No.13380342]

>>13380303
>what is a foil

[Anonymous No.13381340]

Ask him. Duh.

[Anonymous No.13381648]

>>13378805
A nothingness of the will. The perfect image of depression, its not that he would prefer to do other things, he would prefer not to. This "not to" aspect kills any possibility for anything else and days after uttering it first he does exactly that, stops. The narrator says it is because he is going blind but not even mentioning the fact of a potentially unreliable narrator and that no other employee is affected but that Bartleby continues after he is fine. A rebellion against society perhaps? That is what Camus read in it. If you wish to live by your own will then you shall be punished. I once read a paper which claimed the story to be an illustration of a man affected by lead poisoning with some good points so perhaps that: a sickness, but would Melville really write such a story simply to depict illness? Perhaps another illness of the spirit or psyche which he also alludes to in Moby-Dick? Perhaps Bartleby is simply the image of depression and despair after his previous job at the dead letters company: seeing so much lost good, with his purposeless job writing "silently, paley, mechanically." that he loses purpose, and succumbs to despair. An argument is also to be made that he is the psychological mirror of the narrator, both are tied to their job with little else in the world, both are quite apathetic, and the narrator's attitude towards Bartleby is strange: never doing anything about him but letting him be there, much like depressive and their condition. He also keeps Bartleby to his side of the sliding doors as he compartmentalises his feelings about his job while bragging to himself that he knew John Jacob Astor to try convince himself of the value of his life. It is also significant that Bartleby is the only person whose name we learn.
Perhaps Bartleby is how he is due to blocking off communication, being trapped alone for so long. After all the book is subtitled "a story of Wall Street" and this fact never has significance except in the fact of walls. Bartleby has his reveries in front of walls and is walled off from society. His previous employment at the dead letters company is also tied to this I think. So alienated, and with such lack of purpose, he breaks and would simply "prefer not to", admitting his destruction.
Or perhaps something else. Why are the employees named after food? The view that he is autistic is fair, I've also seen some compare him to jesus for some reason. At the end though I think Bartleby shows what Melville feared would become of the workforce, cut off from the world working meaningless jobs and with little else in their lives who would either rebel against this system so to speak and/or die. I am good friends with people who I feel are very similar to Bartleby in this way, some even tried commit suicide as they preferred not to, but their attempts failed thankfully. It is a bleak future Melville predicted, the bleak future which came true.