Posts
Provided by the compucert I was thinking about a story I read in an college level English class many years ago: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street, by Herman Melville. No matter how hard I tried to jog my memory I could NOT recall how it ended. So I ran a search for the short story and found it.
It was fun to re-read this short tale about a Wall Street that I know, but is also unfamiliar since it was written in another era. Mind you that this was long before anyone ever even imagined the concept of a rexograph or photocopy machine. So back then when legal documents needed to be written in multiple copies, a person known as a scrivener took on the task of writing up those copies. This tale is of a lawyer, and his office of scriveners including the mysterious Bartleby, the latest to join the ranks.
This story is so well written that you become engulfed in it immediately. You feel the narrators perplexity over the enigma known as Bartleby and the way he would prefer to do nothing. I would go so far as to say that reading this story might even alter the way you speak. I know that ever since the first time I read it I had used the phrase, "I would prefer not to," countless times.
Of course there's the underlying moral of the story that does a job truly define the man?
I love this story, and highly recommend it if you are in the mood for some quick reading as it's only a short story. I read it over the course of one afternoon while visiting various clients around New York City. Indeed, one was near the Wall Street stop of the 4 or 5 Trains.
It was fun to re-read this short tale about a Wall Street that I know, but is also unfamiliar since it was written in another era. Mind you that this was long before anyone ever even imagined the concept of a rexograph or photocopy machine. So back then when legal documents needed to be written in multiple copies, a person known as a scrivener took on the task of writing up those copies. This tale is of a lawyer, and his office of scriveners including the mysterious Bartleby, the latest to join the ranks.
This story is so well written that you become engulfed in it immediately. You feel the narrators perplexity over the enigma known as Bartleby and the way he would prefer to do nothing. I would go so far as to say that reading this story might even alter the way you speak. I know that ever since the first time I read it I had used the phrase, "I would prefer not to," countless times.
Of course there's the underlying moral of the story that does a job truly define the man?
I love this story, and highly recommend it if you are in the mood for some quick reading as it's only a short story. I read it over the course of one afternoon while visiting various clients around New York City. Indeed, one was near the Wall Street stop of the 4 or 5 Trains.
If you wish to read this short story, here's a link to the site I found it on:
http://www.bartleby.com/129/If you look around that site you can find many other literary treasures ready to read in it's entirety only a click away.
0 comments:
Post a Comment