Bartleby The Scrivener Response

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Bartleby the Scrivener, is a masterfully crafted short story, filled to the brim with character and substance but yet keeping simple enough in it’s ideas so as it could have multiple interpretations. This alone is what makes Bartleby my favorite piece of literature, leaving me lost in thought of my own psyche, contemplating the social commentary for hours after a I had finished reading it. One idea however kept returning to me, until I had decided that it is what Bartleby is to me. Bartleby the Scrivener at it’s core is about the contemplation of purpose and meaning in life. Bartleby himself being the one who portrays this idea the most. As he is the one to realize how menial and pointless all of life has become and will always be.

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I believe it to be his occupations, mostly his previous one of working with dead letters. Reading the last words of hundreds of people, which no doubt had an effect on his psyche, putting many things into perspective for him. Making life far less common a thought to him than life, shrinking his respect and value for life itself. No doubt filling him with the desire to find something in life, besides this depressing existence. It can be inferred that Bartleby left his job and found work as a Scrivener for the law firm, in search of true meaning. Yet he found no meaning, in-fact Bartleby only discovered more monotony and depression in this job than the last. Thus causing him to come to the realization, that there is no meaning to life at all, it is all the same and we are all but dead letters, never to be …show more content…

I would sometimes ponder the same things that lead Bartleby to quit life altogether. If we are but tiny insignificant dots in the grand scheme of both space and time then what is the point of working so diligently? If life itself is nothing more than a compilation of chemically stored memories and reactions in the brain then why care for them? If love itself is the result of millennia of evolution to drive us to live longer than why love, if love itself is fake? These questions haunted my evening after reading Bartleby the Scrivener, putting me into a thoughtful depression. I oddly enjoyed this depression, as contradicting as that sounds, as I was amazed that a story could create these feelings in

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