Bartleby, the Scrivener

“I would prefer not to” — spoken by Bartleby with maddening calm and repeated throughout the text like a tolling bell — is both the story’s engine and its wall. Melville’s narrator, a comfortably self-satisfied Wall Street lawyer, finds himself confronted with a scrivener who will not work, will not leave, and will not explain himself.

Aptly subtitled A Story of Wall-street, the tale is saturated with walls — literal and metaphorical — that block understanding at every turn. What the reader witnesses is not a man come unraveled, but one who has arrived, with terrible serenity, at a complete refusal of the world.

This story is replete with metaphors and imagery, and its overall vagueness is probably the reason why it’s still relevant today and read throughout class rooms and book clubs. Not every 150-year-old work of literary fiction has aged quite as well.

Unser Arbeitsmaterial

• Vocabulary Handout folgt in Kürze

Lesenswerte (und hörenswerte!) Links

• Die Kurzgeschichte ist im Project Gutenberg gemeinfrei zugänglich
• Der Wikipedia-Eintrag enthält interessante Hintergrundinfos zur Rezeptions- und Entstehungsgeschichte
• Sieben-teilige Reihe mit Vorlesung des (deutschen) Originals sowie kurzer Diskussion seiner literarischen Bedeutung in der ARD Mediathek (WDR5)
• Kostenlose Hörfassungen (Public Domain) von LibriVox (Variante 1 und Variante 2)