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quote:But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.
Read Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street here, if you've not. I took another look around, and couldn't find anything supporting that view - it's written as an indictment of either artists or governments, apparently, the latter supported here. I'm not a Melville scholar, so I don't know if there was an underlying Nordic schema for the text, but I'm not that sure of it.
There's some other crit. here, and, even better, here. The latter's "sources" page scoured literary critics' works for references to other people and ideas that could've been used in the creation of the story - Nordic myth isn't mentioned, but, interestingly, both Poe and Buddhism are. |
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