Bartleby The Scrivener Quotes

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He wants to destruct the ideal society and he wants to follow his own rules. Jungyoon Chang gave us an example “He, also, represents the new modern subject who can not only destroy the principle of a given society, that keeps human beings confined within the specific framework, but also, create the possibility of saving the original nature of the human being” (62). He is right. In this story, Bartleby is literally imprisoned in the office, he lives in it day and night because he cannot afford a house. He does not tell anyone about his situation, until one day where his boss discovers that he is living in his own office. He moves from one prison to another and at the end of the novel he is in jail waiting to die. This is another example of confinement; …show more content…
In a brief word or two, he moreover added, that perhaps I had better walk round the block two or three times, and by that time he would probably have concluded his affairs” (Bartleby, the scrivener. Par 86).
The speech Bartleby made is not common to see in a society, people respect their employer and would follow their lead not control them. In this case, the Lawyer has to move out of his office because he fired Bartleby, but Bartleby refuses to leave the building because he did not have anywhere else to go. He is still resisting the Lawyer and the Lawyer is Bartleby’s slave. He has to move his own office because of him, which should be the other way around. Bartleby should be asked to leave instead of making his employer move out of his …show more content…
It is, in some way, a kind of cycle that is being repeated year after year, people after people. Eric Mendelsohn showed us that Bartleby’s story is like that. He stated “In mass society thinking, mass consciousness similarly attributes the effects of social arrangements, habit, custom, and mass media, to the world itself, oblivious to the power of the "repeated statement."” (145). Not only is the society seeing Bartleby as someone who does not conform to their society, but the readers can see that the scriveners are actually copying the beliefs from the past and literally copying documents. Which is where the repeating comes from. He is the only one who does not want to copy or share his thoughts with the Lawyer, and he does not copy or repeat the way society thinks. In the end, Bartleby only wants to do his job his own way and he does not care what society thinks of that. That is why it creates a tension between Bartleby and the society he lives in because we, as readers, are not used to seeing someone like him being resistant to his employer. He is not conforming to the society that he lives in; he is in a way imprison in his own society. There is no positive tension between the individual and the society, in this case, no one is learning from the other and they keep fighting each other until one of them dies. We can see that even if they are all men characters and they are all educated, that the
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