And then there’s an office boy, Ginger Nut, whose working-class father wants him to have a job with a desk instead of a cart, and so has passed him on to the firm as a dollar-per-week apprentice. Nippers is a young man who embodies the kind of directionless ambition to ‘do better’ in life without much in the way of aptitude or focus. Turkey is a man of the narrator’s age who veers between fully inept and bad-tempered, especially after a liquid lunch. Bartleby is the story of a Wall Street legal practice and a narrator who believes that the “easiest way of life is the best”, which is one reason he tolerates a small crew of unpleasant and careless co-workers with bizarre nicknames. But Bartleby is a different proposition altogether, speaking to an extent to Melville’s own personal frustrations with the unglamorous world of making your living by your pen: he had found the process of writing and editing Moby Dick an onerous proposition, and while it’s highly regarded now, its reputation was quite slow to grow after its publication, and not particularly lucrative. Its author, Herman Melville, is renowned these days as one of America’s great novelists, the author of Moby Dick who based many of his seafaring storylines on personal experience. The short story of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, and it’s a testament to passive resistance, of opting out of the world of white-collar work completely. Office work doesn’t present the dangers that many working-class professions could boast, but being sat at one’s desk performing a host of tedious tasks certainly, well, took people in different ways. A new generation of people, educated and trained, took up their places in offices where some of them embodied the new culture of competitiveness and industry and some – didn’t. New York in the 1850s was a rapidly modernising city: as it grew, new strata of white-collar workers emerged to prop up its systems, rules and regulations. It would be a shame if we spend our entire life experiencing the same actions over and over again.Literature’s great refusenik remains as ambiguous as ever – the everyman protestor who rebels of all stripes feel represents them. I realize that I do not want to waste my entire life repeatedly doing the same tasks, and want to experience new things. It makes me wonder if this was how I was to live the rest of my life as. As an employee myself, I can relate to feeling of repeatedly doing the same tasks. If employers do not give employees new opportunities to strength their skills, employees will give up and put no effort into their work. There is a lack of excitement for their jobs, and can even lead to an employee despising their jobs. Even today, many employees suffer from depression as they realize that they have to perform the same tasks daily. Alike the dead letter office, if employees continue to purposely do the same task every day, they will not strive to do better. The dead letter office, is Melville’s portrayal of the lackluster occupations in society that required employees to do repetitive tasks. This repetitive task was both lifeless and pointless. In the dead letter office, Bartley aimlessly spends his time sorting letters that were sent to be destroyed. Bartley’s job in the dead letter office, was the reason for his depression and his loss of motivation. Melville uses the dead letter office to symbolize the repetitive and dreary job that more people were doing. However, I doubt Melville’s mention of the Dead Letter office is in regards to the USPS Mail Recovery Center. In the real world, there is hope that the mail in the formerly known “Dead Letter Office” would have a recipient. While in Herman Melville’s story, the dead letter office seemed like a place that was gloomy and hollow, the USPS Mail Recovery Center, is actually a place where lost mail can be found. According to the USPS, the Mail Recovery Center as formerly known as the “Dead Letter Office.” This center acted as the “lost and found” center for the postal services. After some quick research, I discovered that we do indeed have a dead letter office. Before reading Melville’s story, I had no idea what a dead letter office was, and wondered if one actually exists in the real world. The narrator states that the dead letter office was a place where Bartley sorted letters that had no recipient and would eventually be destroyed. After reading Herman Melville’s Bartley the Scrivener, one part that caught my attention was the mention of dead letter office that Bartley used to work in.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |