Hope you’re enjoying some restful moments over break. We’ll pick up with our regular blogging schedule on Monday. It will be helpful in these final weeks to be reading on two levels by thinking about how each literary voice fits within American Romanticism and by zooming out to the big picture of the course for intertextual breadth. Hope you’ll keep making personal connections, too. Like Thoreau, Melville is trying to make sense of the human condition, only this time the setting is not the forest, but the workplace.
Questions for “Bartleby, the Scrivener”:
- So far, we’ve considered two branches of American Romanticism: Gothic literature and Transcendentalism. Where does Melville fit in this conversation? What is Romanticism, according to Melville? Where does his style seem most Romantic, in the literary sense?
- What do you learn about the narrator from his observations of the other characters? What makes him reliable or unreliable? How does the narrator’s personal philosophy compare with Thoreau’s?
- Bartleby is perhaps the most enigmatic character we’ve seen. What do you learn about Bartleby through the contrasts that Melville sets up with Ginger Nut, Turkey, and Nippers? How do you explain Bartleby’s behavior? What transformations do you see in his character throughout the story?
- What do you think you would have done if you had been faced with the narrator’s dilemma? What do you think might have been the most ethical response to Bartleby’s situation?
- What does Melville add to the larger conversation about American identity in the course readings?
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