![]() This fictional world seems bricked in by walls, and by the minutiae of documents and of articles. ![]() The narrator seems an affable and kindly gentleman – a lawyer, who deals in deeds, bonds, mortgages, and such-like. The setting of “Bartleby the Scrivener” could not be further removed than the open seas of Moby-Dick: we are in Wall Street, then, as now, the financial centre of America. Both are works of a startling vision and originality, and, for all the solidity of the prose, seem more elusive the more deeply one peers into them. But since the actual plotlines of these works seem to me among their less interesting aspects, knowing them beforehand is unlikely to detract from the experience of reading these works.īefore tackling that monster Moby-Dick, I thought it best to ease myself into Melville’s fictional world with two shorter works – the short story “Bartleby the Scrivener”, written in the early 50s shortly after Moby-Dick and Melville’s late novella, Billy Budd, Sailor, found amongst his papers in an incomplete state after his death in 1891. ![]() Please note: The following contains “spoilers” for both “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Billy Budd, Sailor. ![]()
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