![]() He has been “filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” and is therefore an “eminently safe man”, Melville has described the world with a few brief touches, but it has become quite vivid. He is committed only to safety and security. The narrator in this story seems perfectly adapted to life in an authoritarian world. Melville’s characters in Bartleby the Scrivener, are portrayed as “half-man” who are victims of a society which stifles their natural ability to feel and act according to their romantic role as an individual in society. To Melville, the modern mechanized and authoritarian society so minutely divides a person’s responsibilities it reduces the scope of his ability to interact with himself, nature, and his community. The narrator himself and Bartleby, are victims of the mechanisms of progress they both lost job due to some bureaucratic change. Most people concerned with this world of work and business adapt themselves to it with varying degrees of success. The work environment is devoid of any human warmth - chilly sterile, dark. Bartleby the Scrivener works in an incredibly bleak-world, and the landscape of the Wall Street is completely unnatural. Bartleby is cut off from the world, being in this place, not only in terms of space, but also of time, since his previous history is unknown, and could not be extracted by the author.Īnother theme is the bleak world of work and business. At night the stirring activity of bustling people is no more it becomes a grimly desolate place as silent and dark as death itself. Bartleby works there by day and stays there at night. Wall Street is a bleak and unnatural landscape. Now he works in a chamber of a lawyer that stares at a wall. Previous to joining the author, Bartleby had to deal with dead letters in a dead-letter office in Washington. His situation in life and his working environment cut him off from nature and afterwards from other men. Bartleby is one of the most isolated characters in all literatures. The first theme that draws our attention is the theme of isolation and failure to connect. The themes implicit in the story Bartleby the Scrivener are various but they have been well-integrated in the story by the superb artistic skill of the author. Some work, like a detective story, may be written primarily for entertainment. It is not ‘ necessary that a work must have a theme. For example, the subject of a poem may be a flower, but its theme may be a comment on the fleeting nature of existence. Theme, on the other hand, is a comment, an observation or insight about the subject. ![]() ![]() Subject, generally is the topic or thing described in a subject. The theme of a work is an abstract concept, seldom stated directly, but most often indirectly expressed through recurrent images, actions, characters, and symbols and must be inferred by the reader or spectator. In literature, theme means the central or dominating idea, the message implicit in a work. What do you think is the message of Melville in this story?Īnswer: The answer to the question requires that we should have, in the first place, a clear idea about what we understand by theme. How has the author of Bartleby the Scrivener suggested different themes in the story? Several themes have been interwoven in the story Bartleby the Scrivener. ![]()
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