Reading Notes W 7: Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener , Part B

In the "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville, it tells the story of the Lawyer who runs a law practice on Wall Street in New York. United States in the nineteenth century—Walt Whitman and Herman Melville—were born in New York in 1819. In his teens, Melville worked unhappily as a copyist and errand boy in a bank, and then became a sailor, setting out for the South Pacific at the age of twenty. Melville career as a writer went no more smoothly than his family life , which was marrying someone he did not like to then get a divorce years later and having his son commit suicide.  Many of his works were judged very hard those stories included Typee and its successor, Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852). So Melville published an anonymous short story in Putnam’s Magazine called “Bartleby the Scrivener" because he needed money. It was not until the 1920s about 30 years after his death that Melville’s would rise to become a popular author. 

The start with an elderly man who is lawyer talking about a person named Bartleby who was a scrivener when he was younger. Before he goes into detail he introduces and describes three others who are also working in the office at the time, they are turkey, nippers, and Ginger nut. He goes on to say Turkey is an excellent scrivener in the morning, but as the day goes on particularly in the afternoon he becomes more prone to making mistakes, dropping ink plots on the copies he writes. As well as his mood changes to something more undesirable. Nippers at twenty-five years old, who is an exact opposite of Turkey, because he has trouble working in the morning. Then theres Ginger Nut who is not a scrivener, but an errand-boy. That called ginger nut because he is always picking up ginger nut cake for Turkey and Nipper. He them goes on to introduce Bartleby who is a new hire in the office that responded to an ad for help. One day the Lawyer has a small document he needs examined. He calls Bartleby in to do the job, but Bartleby says "I would prefer not to"(p.301). Which was big shock since his main purpose of being there was to work. Then the rest is about all the characters interactions with one another.