Bartleby the scribe

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Herman Melville, oil painting 1846–47

Bartleby the scribe is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville , which was published under the original title Bartleby the Scrivener . It is the first work Melville wrote after Moby Dick and was initially published anonymously in November and December 1853 in two parts in Putnam's Monthly Magazine . A slightly modified version was first included in book form in 1856 in the anthology The Piazza Tales , along with five other short stories in prose form, including Benito Cereno and Billy Budd .

The first German translation by Karl Lerbs was published in 1946 under the title Bartleby by Zürcher Arche Verlag . Since then, numerous other translations have been published under various titles such as Der Schreiber Bartleby or Bartleby, the typist , some with subtitles such as The Strange Life of a Clerk in Old New York or A Story from Wall Street . Two more recent translations were published in 2002 by Elisabeth Schnack in Manesse Verlag in Zurich and in 2010 by Felix Mayer in Anaconda Verlag in Cologne .

The story is sometimes compared to The Coat of Gogol , but it also points to the 20th century, especially to Kafka . For numerous critics, it is considered the most successful of Melville's stories.

content

As a first-person narrator, an elderly lawyer and notary reports about one of his typists named Bartleby, whom he takes one day into his lightless office on Wall Street , which is surrounded by skyscrapers . Bartleby begins his work with quiet diligence and solitary perseverance. He tirelessly copied contracts, but to the surprise of his employer soon turned down any other job with the words: “I would prefer not to”. Soon he even refuses to copy contracts, but now lives in the office - polite, joyless, with no friends and almost no food. The lawyer cannot or does not want to have him forcibly removed from the firm and Bartleby is not interested in a generous severance payment. Because of an inexplicable agreement with Bartleby, the lawyer is ultimately forced to move out of the office himself instead of killing Bartleby. His new tenants - less understanding - soon let Bartleby be taken away by the police and taken to The Tombs prison . There, Bartleby denies all communication and all food. The lawyer tries to take care of his "friend", but after a few days Bartleby dies of his refusal to live.

The only thing the lawyer can tell about Bartleby's past life is a rumor that he later heard that Bartleby used to work in a dead letter office , a collection point for undeliverable letters.

Narrative

The action that begins with the appearance of Bartleby is described in the main part of the story by the first-person narrator in a series of episodes, the sequence of which is clearly structured by temporal signals such as “one morning”, “on the third day” or “a few days later” .

The events are narrated in a linear fashion and although the times are relatively vague, the narrated time could be around 4 weeks. During this period, a gradual climax of refusal is described: from the attitude of the somehow distant employee Bartleby to his early refusal of additional tasks and the limitation of his circle of life to the office to his complete refusal of all work and, later in prison, his refusal of life at all.

As Bartley's behavior becomes increasingly independent of the demands placed on him, the effort of the first-person narrator shifts from the effort to influence his writer to the effort to learn to understand him. Accordingly, Bartleby's strange behavior, the narrator's attempts to influence and his reflections take up different space in the individual episodes. If Bartleby's behavior is straightforward towards his development up to the absolute refusal of any expression of life, then the narrator's reaction is characterized by the fluctuation between different attempts to include Bartleby in his own world and to understand him, whereby the narrator's concern is more and more grows.

While in the first part of the story the focus is on Bartley's rapture from the social outside world and interpersonal alienation, the story in the second part focuses on the increasing self-alienation and the falling apart of the personality of the protagonist as it has been around 100 years later in 1960 in the well-known work The Divided Self. An Existential Study on Sanity and Madness (Eng .: The Divided Self. An Existential Study of Mental Health and Madness , 1987) by the renowned British psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing is described.

An exception to this story, which is so transparent in the visible but so mysterious in the background, is the subsequent mention of a rumor: Before he was employed in the law firm, Bartleby was an employee in the Dead Letter Office , a department for undeliverable letters. This simulated reference to the beginning of Bartleby's change is thus given a key function.

While the late reference to Bartleby's previous employment breaks the linearity of the narrative, on the other hand a uniform texture of several motifs runs parallel to the gradual increase to the grotesque . From the outset, the notary's office is described as similar to the prison to which Bartleby is finally admitted: the light rushes through light shafts like in a dungeon, the walls of the neighboring houses stand close to the windows and a window with a view of a wall stands Bartleby and often dreams while standing in the office, just as he looks at a wall several times later in the prison yard. In addition, the other employees of the notary also perform their services, which the notary even considers boring, like "soldiers"; In expanding this metaphorical comparison, they deploy their “ columns ” and attack the enemy. In addition, Bartleby is symbolically doomed to die from the beginning, “always mute, pale, mechanical”, and his early social and psychological death is only supplemented by his imminent physical death in the end. These motifs, which echo over and over again, are both the framework and the definition of the action that takes place with them.

As in many of his other works, Melville also uses the figure of an older lawyer as a first-person narrator who has to do with a number of interesting and eccentric people in his professional life. The narrator, however, refrains from going into the lives of the other writers in his office and concentrates in his narrative largely on the report of his encounter with Bartleby, who, according to him, was “a writer and indeed the strangest I have ever seen. I've ever heard of ". It is unusual, however, that he knows hardly anything about Bartleby, as he reports to the reader: “Bartleby was one of those people about whom nothing can be ascertained, except from the sources themselves, and in his case they only flowed extremely poorly . What I saw of Bartleby with my own astonished eyes represents all of my knowledge of him - apart from, however, a rather vague report which will be reproduced here later ”.

Accordingly, the lawyer does not tell in order to entertain the reader or to move emotionally, but only shares his astonishment and his questions about a figure who seems surprising to him and about which hardly anything can be determined. For the reader it follows from this basic narrative situation that he is exclusively dependent on the perspective of the first-person narrator and only very little is learned from Bartleby, but all the more from the attorney's concern and his efforts to help Bartleby through the exploration of his Understanding the incomprehensible. Right from the start, the reader is fully involved in the narrator's approach, shares in his astonishment and is at the same time encouraged to classify the Bartleby phenomenon like the narrator in his own world of experience.

Much like Edgar Allan Poe in a number of his shorter stories, the first-person narrator in Melville's story goes to great lengths to make himself credible to the reader. Melville gives his first-person narrator enough space to introduce himself as a person who acts with caution in his world and knows how to assert himself. Yet this self-characterization does not come about without a considerable amount of complacency. The lawyer reports, for example, of his relationship with the famous John Jacob Astor : "Not to fame me, but as a simple fact I report on this occasion that I have not been without professional relationships with the immortalized John Jacob Astor." Use of the litotes (in the original: "not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor" ) is in contrast to the negative in the main clause and reveals the narrator's vanity. The irony of the author is also evident in this passage of text, which is intended to prevent the reader from easily identifying with the narrator's point of view.

In this way, the reader is already unsettled in two ways at the outset: through the narrative perspective, he is encouraged to share with the narrator his uncertainty with regard to the Bartleby phenomenon; At the same time, however, the reader is also confused about the reliability of the lawyer as a narrator and reporter, since he learns of its limits early on. Accordingly, as the story progresses, the reader feels all the more tempted to interpret the Bartleby phenomenon himself and to understand it better than the narrator.

Different interpretations

Like almost all of Melville's works, this narrative is open to different, often contradicting or mutually exclusive interpretations in view of the ambiguity of the author's understanding of the world , which is inherent in the work .

In the figure of Bartleby one wanted to see a self-portrait of the author or a parable on the situation of an unsuccessful writer who fell silent and refused to accept the incomprehension of his contemporaries. The description of the overwhelming office on Wall Street is also read as a criticism of Melville's soulless business in the booming financial metropolis of New York . Accordingly, the author calls his story A Story of Wall Street in the title , and the walls of the houses surrounding the office and those of the prison are a dominant symbol . However, attempts at interpretation in this direction fall short in that they assume a specific motive for the puzzling behavior of the title hero, which is not mentioned in the story itself and which excludes other, equally conceivable reasons.

All further attempts at interpretation are faced with the double task of tapping into both Bartley's changes and the secret agreement of his employer with him.

Bartleby seems to have become infected with hopelessness and despair while dealing with undeliverable letters and enters the office in this state of latent listlessness. His “I would rather not” can initially be understood as an attempt to rescue a sensitive and sick individual from work that has been described several times as very widespread and extremely boring. Since Bartley's powers of resistance are waning and he does not see his dreams of a meaningful life becoming a reality, all that remains for him on the basis of such a reading is the widening exclusion of unreasonable expectations and - ultimately - life itself. Bartley's grotesque consequence, however, lifts his behavior from the given concrete framework and thus refers to something general.

Because in the situation of many Bartleby it takes other people to survive: people like Turkey (dt. Turkey ) and Nippers (dt. Pliers ), the other two writers of the firm that made the movement of the sun - and indirectly whatsoever - and gain their vital energy from the hot pepper nuts that are consumed permanently. With their partly level-headed, partly activist, partly ironically distant work attitude, these two confront Bartley's gentle vulnerability - by no means as role models, but as a still vague warning.

Your employer, the notary who is in contact with the highest circles due to his specialization in real estate transfers, is behaving very “un-American” towards Bartleby during these weeks. Even if the lawyer describes himself as not very ambitious and self-deprecating as the “author of difficult-to-understand documents of all kinds”, he develops a surprising sympathy for Bartleby, who refuses to work and whom he finally calls his “friend” several times. He is impressed by his psychological stoicism , which manifests itself in Bartleby's efforts to withdraw from all external influences into his inner world and to oppose all pressures from the outside world. The notary rejects his initial impulse to fire Bartleby; In a telling graphic analogy , his behavior is reminiscent of a bust of Cicero that he has in his office and that could just as easily be removed from the office instead of Bartelebys. As a first-person narrator he writes in his report: “If only the slightest uncertainty, indignation, impatience or insolence had been perceptible in him, in other words: if he had only somehow appeared human in the normal sense, I would undoubtedly have him with me all emphasis was put out of the house. As it was, I might as well have shown my plastered Cicero bust out of the house ” .

Instead of firing Bartleby, he instead grants him a place of rest in his office that the other employees and business partners have registered with incomprehension.

According to some interpreters, the motive for this ostensibly incomprehensible indulgence of the first-person narrator lies in the gentleness and mildness, but also in Bartleby's determination, which is already expressed linguistically in his “I would rather not” and disarms the narrator.

Other interpreters see the reason for this inexplicable agreement of the notary in the fact that Bartleby's refusals evoke a special compassion, a Christian brotherhood and solidarity in the first-person narrator. Because both the notary and his other employees may see more than just a negative spirit in Bartleby, as Bartleby's “I would rather not” begin to creep into their speaking behavior. According to this reading, Bartleby becomes the one who also claims a life of hope and meaningfulness for her and who does not want to be bought off again with an alienated or less fulfilling activity as in the dead letter office .

In contrast, the renowned American literary scholar and interpreter Mordecai Marcus sees Bartleby as a psychological doppelganger of the nameless first-person narrator and lawyer in his interpretation of the story. His obsessive concern for Bartleby and the fact that Bartleby as a protagonist also remains without any biographical background suggests, according to Mordecai, that Bartleby is a purely imaginary figure in the consciousness of the first-person narrator. Mordecai sees further evidence for such an interpretation of the story in the behavior described by Bartleby, who never leaves the office and lives on practically nothing. After refusing to continue his work, he leads a parasitic existence at the expense of the first-person narrator, according to Mordecai, with the exact dependency relationships between the two remaining mysteriously vague. Mordecai also interprets Bartleby's refusal to leave the firm despite all temptations and threats as an expression of the fact that it is his life's work to remain in the realm of the first-person narrator. His compulsive way of life as well as his otherwise inexplicable stubbornness suggestively suggest that Bartleby is the unconscious embodiment of a perverse determination of the lawyer, which would break out in the gentle and philanthropic first-person narrator should he protest his desire for relentless passivity give in to his previous lifestyle. Mordecai's interpretation of the narrative is also supported by the fact that Bartleby gains increasing power over the first-person narrator in the course of the story and that the narrator, as can be shown in numerous details, increasingly identifies with Bartleby.

In other interpretations, Bartleby's “I would rather not” is understood to mean that freedom of human choice of action is assumed which, although socially utopian and consequently grotesque, fascinates employers as well as Bartley's colleagues as a significant alternative. The notary soon sided with his employee, who was dying of a lack of hope and purpose. With his active compassion out of Christian responsibility, the lawyer himself comes into conflict with the Protestant ethics of early American capitalism , which seeks to recognize moral defects behind every failure, and ends his story with the prophetic-pessimistic exclamation: “O Bartleby! O mankind! "

At no point in the narrative can the text itself be defined as a positive interpretation of the protagonist's behavior, neither as moral-ethical justice in the sense of a "moral law" , nor in the sense of the "chronometrical characters" who succumb to folly or sin as Melville had previously designed in the world of characters by Redburn , Moby Dick , Billy Budd or Pierre .

The same applies to interpretative approaches that Bartleby primarily understand as depicting the conflict between the individual and society. Accordingly, the title figure is understood either as a representative of an extreme individualism that is unwilling to obey the commandments or laws of human coexistence, or as a victim of an inhuman society that is not prepared to take its individuality into account. The narrator himself bends to the laws of society at certain points in the story, for example when he thinks he has to show consideration for his business friends; to that extent the incompatibility of the individual and society actually comes into play in the narrative action. Nevertheless, the repeatedly ambiguous relationship between the narrator and his writer Bartleby cannot be subordinated to such an antinomy as a whole. Part of the message of the narrative lies in the openness of both possibilities of social conformity on the one hand and eccentricity or dissidence on the other. An interpretation of the meaning of the narrative, which contains an evaluation in favor of one of these opposite poles, is only justified as a “ contemplation ” stimulated by the narrative in the reader , which presupposes the individual values ​​of the respective viewer or interpreter from the outset.

Bartleby has been repeatedly discussed as a symbol of passive resistance or civil disobedience , including in the context of the Occupy movement . The English scholar and translator Jan Wilm sees Bartleby, who works in the heart of the emerging financial sector, as someone who totally denies the world of capital: He doesn't work, he doesn't consume, he doesn't take money from his employer. For Gilles Deleuze , Bartleby is a kind of postmodern hero who refuses to be a cog in the gears of great systems and world designs: He is “... the man who is depressed and mechanized by the great metropolises, from whom one might expect the future man or a new world emerges from it. ”According to Christian Holl, Bartleby embodies“ ... a principle of exposing a system by not accepting its mechanisms ”, in this case of bureaucracy, which is characterized by pointless and boring typing . The first-person narrator is astonishingly powerless against Bartleby's behavior: until the end, he hesitates to call the police to remove his enigmatic copyist from the office, among other things because he doesn't even know why he went to the police should. After all, Bartleby doesn't do anything criminal - he just doesn't do anything.

History of works

An important source of Melville's narrative was probably an advertisement for a book called The Lawyer's Story , which appeared in both the New York Tribune and the New York Times for February 18, 1853. This work was published anonymously later that year, but was actually written by the writer James A. Maitland, popular with contemporary readers.

In the advertisement, the first chapter of The Lawyer's Story was printed in full, which had the following wording in the opening sentence: “In the summer of 1843, having an extraordinary quantity of deeds to copy, I engaged, temporarily, an extra copying clerk, who interested me considerably, in consequence of his modest, quiet, gentlemanly demeanor, and his intense application to his duties " . Apart from this thematically evocative introductory sentence, however, no other conspicuous parallels or similarities can be found between the first chapter of The Lawyer's Story printed in the advertisement and Melville's narrative, as Hershel Parker notes in his Melville biography, published in 2002.

The American literary scholar Andrew Lyndon Knighton also suspects that Melville also served as a further source or inspiration for his story from an insignificant work by Robert Grant White Law and Laziness: or Students at Law of Leisure from 1846. This work contains a scene and various characters, including an inactive or idle scribe, who may have influenced Melville's story.

Perhaps Melville Bartleby wrote the Scrivener as an emotionally tinged response to the reviews with which the criticism of his novel Pierre, published a year earlier in 1852 ; or, The Ambiguities ( Pierre or the ambiguities , German first edition 1965) had reacted.

Jorge Luis Borges puts Bartleby with the story Wakefield by Nathaniel Hawthorne in connection, which was admired by Melville as a model and was also with him corresponded contact. Wakefield is about a man who one day leaves his wife for no apparent reason, only to secretly rent an apartment a street corner from his old apartment for 20 years.

The American Melville researcher Christopher W. Sten assumes that Melville's story was also inspired by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and sees certain parallels in particular with his essay The Transcendentalist , in which the fundamental doctrine of American transcendentalism was established.

Some literary scholars also see autobiographical influences in relation to the genesis of the narrative. In the spring of 1851, while working on his famous novel Moby Dick , Melville saw himself in part in a situation similar to that of the title character Bartleby in his story, who persistently refuses to do the paperwork that is required of him. In Bartleby the writer , Melville may try to express his frustration and disappointment with his own work as a writer in an increasingly commercialized cultural establishment and an alienated society.

Melville aspect of the narrative figure of the firm employees nicknamed Nippers (dt. Beißzange ) contains many useful imaging allusions to the few years before died at a young age poet Edgar Allan Poe , whose fate Melville during the time of origin of the clerk Bartleby employed in particular. For Melville, Poe was a prime example of the tragic failure of an American artist and writer who found himself at odds with his critics and his own age. Poe's irritability and failed ambitions find expression in Melville's story as the most obvious traits of Nippers: like Poe, Nippers is a stinging critic; however, his curses and abuse are ineffective. Nippers also shows a kind of madness and extreme irritability, just as Poe developed in the last years of his life in the unsuccessful search for donors to found his own literary magazine that would have enabled him to express his ideas without outside interference and control to implement.

Bartleby the scribe can be seen as Melville's first attempt in the form of a prose form of independent shorter narrative; Against this background, it is all the more astonishing that in his narrative style, which tends towards epic breadth, he succeeds in limiting the description to the narrator's situation vis-à-vis Bartleby. Above all, the consistently maintained perspective and the narrator's focus on the straightforward development in the behavior of his writer contribute to this. Melville shows here the relationship to the short prose of his time, but shows not only a similarity in a number of features but also his difference to the other writers of his time. As with Poe, Melville shows his first-person narrator gradually becoming intrigued by the unusual. At the same time he succeeds in transferring this fascination of the narrator to the reader. In contrast to Poe, Melville's narrative reaches its climax in the middle of the story and does not carry the narrative tension on the same level to the end.

The question of the motives for the hero's unusual behavior also has Melville in common with a number of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne . However, unlike Hawthorne, the incomprehensibility of his protagonist's strange behavior no longer allows a distinction to be made between good and evil.

The fascination emanating from Bartleby is increasingly broken for the reader by doubts about the correctness of the behavior and judgment of the narrator. The formal differences to Poe and Hawthorne also lie in the irony of the first-person narrator that pervades the story.

This does not result in a unity of effect in the sense of Poe; the reader feels increasingly urged to fathom Bartleby's secret for himself. In his attempt to find an explanation for the hero's strange behavior, he is supported in particular by the diverse images and metaphors such as the wall behind the window of Bartleby's desk or the folding wall behind Bartleby, which are directly dependent on the narrator, but ultimately refer back to the intention of the author.

Bartleby dies at the end of the Tombs with his eyes fixed on the thick prison walls, which the narrator compares with the masonry of Egyptian pyramids. The narrator also compares the cheerful Sunday bustle on Broadway with the terrifying loneliness of Wall Street , which the protagonist no longer wants to leave. Another analogy is suggested to the reader by the narrator when he reports on the rumor that Bartleby was previously supposed to have worked in the Dead Letter Office .

In this analogy, the wall becomes a symbol of isolation, through which the person who needs help and support can no longer be reached. However, the meaning of this pictorial analogy does not stop there. In the same way as the narrator is fascinated by Bartleby, he himself seems to be so captivated by the wall that he can no longer avert his gaze. The epithet dead in the connection dead-wall as well as dead-end becomes a reference to death; the prison wall of the tombs in which Bartleby dies is equated with the tombs of the Egyptian kings.

With this extension of the fascination of the narrator by the fascination of Bartleby through the wall, further questions are made impossible, but at the same time it creates unrest in the reader, which stimulates them to ask what is hidden behind the wall and to question the answers that the Narrator at the hand of the reader.

By shaping the incomprehensible in a way that leaves the reader uneasy, the reader is not only stimulated in his dismay to find his own answers, but ultimately also a certain unity of effect is achieved in the shaping of the story , albeit in a different form, as Poe envisaged as a poetic principle in his Philosophy of Composition from 1846.

The narrative situation and the narrator in Bartleby the scribe also have different similarities with Benito Cereno . Likewise, the further development of Melville's imaginary world or at least a variant of it can be shown by comparing the wall picture in Bartleby the Schreiber and Moby Dick .

While captain Ahab at a central point in Moby Dick thinks it is still possible to break through the wall ( “All visible objects… are but paste-board masks. […] If one will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall. To me the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. " ), Bartleby has given up or never attempted to break through the wall.

To what extent this reflects Melville's own resignation, especially with regard to his failure or his feeling of disappointment at not being understood with Moby Dick and Pierre , cannot be answered with certainty.

Any further interpretations of other work-historical contexts that Melville's narrative attempt to understand as a direct reaction to specific writings of his contemporaries, however, as Link found in his analysis, cancel each other out if, on the one hand, they see Bartleby as a satire on Henry David Thoreau's works Walden or Civil Disobedience , but on the other hand as a response to Thomas Carlyle's conception of the Everlasting Yea , as presented in his work Sartor Resartus from 1831 as a permanent affirmation of the goodness of the world to express one's own spiritual perfection. According to Link, the correct starting point for the investigation of such connections is that Melville wrote his narrative in full awareness of the intellectual or spiritual controversies of the time, but with Bartleby tried to create his own answer or his own dilemma artistically.

Selected German text editions

The story is available in at least 14 German-language translations, which were also published under other titles such as Bartleby , Der Schreiber Bartleby or Bartleby, the writer's assistant and partly with subtitles such as The Strange Life of a Chancellery in Old New York or A Story from Wall Street . Translated from American English include:

Selected German audio editions

Selected literature

  • Giorgio Agamben : Bartleby or Contingency followed by Absolute Immanence . Merve, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-88396-146-9 .
  • Christopher Bollas: Melville's Lost Self: Bartleby . In: Psyche . No. 2, 1978, pp. 155-164.
  • Gilles Deleuze : Bartleby or the formula. Merve, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-88396-113-2 .
  • Jane Desmarais: Preferring not to: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville's “Bartleby” . In: Journal of the Short Story in English , Volume 36, Spring 2001, pp. 25–39, accessible online at [12] .
  • Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118-128.
  • Mordecai Marcus: Melville's Bartleby As a Psychological Double . In: College English 23 (1962), pp. 365–368, here p. 365. Archived in the Internet Archive under [13] .
  • Stéphane Poulin: Bartleby, the writer ( graphic novel ). Publishing house Jacoby & Stuart, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-942787-37-6 .
  • Enrique Vila-Matas: Bartleby & Co. Fischer, Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-596-17875-9 .

Selected films

Selected operas

  • Music: Walter Aschaffenburg, libretto: Edward Albee
  • Information about Bartleby. Short opera in 11 stations based on Herman Melville (2003), music: Benjamin Schweitzer , libretto: Benjamin Schweitzer and Norbert Lange with material by Herman Melville
  • Dead Wall Tales , music theater based on “Bartleby the writer” by András Hamary (music, video animations) and Christian Golusda (text version, staging) with Patrik Erni (Bartleby) and Christian Golusda (lawyer); Würzburg and Frankfurt, 2015.

See also

Web links

Wikisource: Bartleby the Scrivener  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the history of publications, see, for example, Harrison Hayford, Alma a. MacDougall and G. Thomas Anselle eds. Edition of Herman Melville: The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces . The Writings of Hermann Melville. North Western University Press and The Newberry Library, Evanston and Chicago 1987, 3rd edition 1995, ISBN 0-8101-0550-0 , pp. 572f. See also Browse Making of America - Putnam's Monthly from 1855 at Cornell University Library . Retrieved June 8, 2017.
  2. ↑ See Robert Milder: Hermann Melville . In: Emory Elliott (Ed.): The Columbia Literary History of the United States . Columbia University Press 1988, ISBN 978-0-231-05812-4 , pp. 439. See also Hershel Parker: Herman Melville: A Biography . Volume 2, 1851-1891 . The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2002, ISBN 0-8018-6892-0 , p. 179. Likewise, Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 118.
  3. ↑ See Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 121.
  4. ↑ See Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 121.
  5. ↑ See Jane Desmarais: Preferring not to: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville's “Bartleby” . In: Journal of the Short Story in English , Volume 36, Spring 2001, pp. 25–39, here p. 18, available online at [1] . Desmarais refers in this connection to the numerous interpretations of the story in secondary literature in literary studies, in which the personality split or the doubling of the personality of Bartleby is discussed.
  6. ↑ See, for example, the interpretative approach in the Sparknotes Hermann Melville -Bartleby the Scrivener. Analysis. . Retrieved June 4, 2017
  7. ^ On this analysis of the narrative situation and perspective, cf. Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here pp. 119f.
  8. ↑ See Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here pp. 118 and 128.
  9. ↑ See, for example, the review by Thomas Harbach Hermann Melville - Bartleby . On: sf-radio.net . Retrieved June 4, 2017. See also Jane Desmarais: Preferring not to: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville's “Bartleby” . In: Journal of the Short Story in English , Volume 36, Spring 2001, pp. 25–39, here pp. 25f., Accessible online at [2] . See also the interpretative approach in the Sparknotes Hermann Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener . Retrieved June 4, 2017
  10. ↑ See Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 127.
  11. ↑ Cf. on this reading, for example, the interpretative approach in the Sparknotes Bartleby the Scrivener - Themes, Motifs, and Symbols . Retrieved June 4, 2017.
  12. ↑ See the German text edition given below on Projekt Gutenberg-De. In the original the passage reads: “Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. ” Cf. the text output on Wikisource given below. For the interpretation of this passage, see the interpretation of Jane Desmarais: Preferring not to: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville's “Bartleby” . In: Journal of the Short Story in English , Volume 36, Spring 2001, pp. 25–39, here pp. 21f., Accessible online at [3] .
  13. ^ See, for example, Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 122.
  14. ↑ See, for example, John Matteson: “A New Race Has Sprung Up” for an approach in this direction . Prudence, Social Consensus and the Law in "Bartleby the Scrivener" . Leviathan. 10 (1) , 2008, pp. 25-49. See also Barlteby the Scrivner: Theme Analysis on novelguide.com . Retrieved June 6, 2017. See similar rudiments of Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 123. Link interprets the first-person narrator's reaction as a resigned retreat "to the commandment of Christian neighborly love" after the lawyer's reason had no power has more about Bartleby.
  15. ↑ See Mordecai Marcus: Melville's Bartleby As a Psychological Double . In: College English 23 (1962), pp. 365–368, here p. 365. Archived in the Internet Archive under [4] . Retrieved June 6, 2017
  16. ↑ In the original the passage reads: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! ” (See text on Wikisource). For the interpretation of the textual statement in this, see the presentation of different interpretations of the story in Jane Desmarais: Preferring not to: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville's “Bartleby” . In: Journal of the Short Story in English , Volume 36, Spring 2001, pp. 25-39, accessible online at [5] . Retrieved on June 4, 2017. See also the summary of the interpretative approaches going in this direction in Mordecai Marcus: Melville's Bartleby As a Psychological Double . In: College English 23 (1962), pp. 365–368, here p. 365. Archived in the Internet Archive under [6] . Retrieved June 6, 2017
  17. ↑ See more detailed Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118-128, here pp. 127f.
  18. ↑ Thomas Assheuer: Democracy: The new naysayers . In: The time . September 21, 2013, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed August 14, 2017]).
  19. ↑ Herman Melville: "Bartleby, the writer" - FAZ reading room . In: FAZ reading room . February 17, 2016 ( faz.net [accessed August 14, 2017]).
  20. Jump up to work: Why Bartleby would have to abolish himself - Sebastian Dörfler . In: Sebastian Dörfler . September 15, 2012 ( sebastian-doerfler.de [accessed on August 14, 2017]).
  21. ↑ Christian Holl: The Bartleby Principle. Retrieved August 14, 2017 .
  22. ↑ See Johannes Dietrich Bergmann: “Bartleby” and The Lawyer's Story . In: American Literature , 47 (3), November 1975, 432–436, accessible online as a PDF file at [7]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved June 5, 2017.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / ap-juniors.hs.tenafly.k12.nj.us  
  23. ↑ See Hershel Parker: Herman Melville: A Biography . Volume 2, 1851-1891 . The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2002, ISBN 0-8018-6892-0 , pp. 150 and 178f. The quoted introductory sentence from The Lawyer's Story is printed there on p. 150. See also Johannes Dietrich Bergmann: "Bartleby" and The Lawyer's Story . In: American Literature , 47 (3), November 1975, 432–436, accessible online as a PDF file at [8]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved June 5, 2017@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / ap-juniors.hs.tenafly.k12.nj.us  
  24. ↑ See Andrew Lyndon Knighton, The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby's Idleness . In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , Volume 53, Number 2, 2007, pp. 184–215, here pp. 191–192.
  25. ↑ See Daniel A. Wells: Bartleby the Scrivener, Poe, and the Duyckinck Circle . In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance . Number 21, First Quarter 1975 , pp. 35-39, archived in the Internet Archive under [9] . Retrieved June 6, 2017.
  26. ^ Jorge Luis Borges: Inquisitions . Fischer, 1992, p. 72 .
  27. ↑ See Christopher W. Sten: Bartleby, the Transcendentalist: Melville's Dead Letter to Emerson . In: Modern Language Quarterly 35 , March 1974, pp. 30-44.
  28. ↑ See, for example, Leo Marx: Melville's Parable of the Walls . In: Sewanee Review 61 (1953), pp. 602-627, archived in the Internet Archive under [10] . Retrieved June 6, 2017.
  29. ↑ See, for example, Compassion: Toward Neighbors - Reading: "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" By Herman Melville . Retrieved June 6, 2017.
  30. ↑ See Daniel A. Wells: Bartleby the Scrivener, Poe, and the Duyckinck Circle . In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance . Number 21, First Quarter 197 5, pp. 35–39, archived in the Internet Archive e under [11] . Retrieved June 6, 2017.
  31. ↑ See more detailed Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here pp. 124–126.
  32. ↑ See in detail Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here pp. 124–126. The quoted passage from Moby Dick is also printed there.
  33. ↑ See Franz H. Link: Melville • Bartleby, The Scrivener. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3 513 022123 , pp. 118–128, here p. 127.