Bartleby, The Epitome of Passivity: An Elegy For Humandkind

Abstract

Keywords

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Bartleby, the Epitome of Passitivity: an Elegy for Humankind

Abstract

In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot discusses the concepts of disaster, the Other, passivity, and responsibility. His aphorisms can help us to analyse the relationship between Bartleby and the narrator-attorney in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”. This story presents significant insights into the relationship with the Other, and how the Other is a burden that each person involuntarily experiences. In this paper, I will discuss the reasons for, and the effects of, passive resistance, in addition to the inextricable feeling of responsibility that is experienced in the face of the Other.

Keywords

• Bartleby
• Epitome
• Passitivity

References

1. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster [translated by Ann Smock] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
2. Deleuze, G. Essays Critical and Clinical [translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco] (London: Verso, 1998).
3. Melville, Herman. Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street, (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, 2005), p.2,< retrieved from http://courses.washington.edu/art361a/readings/herman_ melville.pdf, on 23thSeptember, 2012.
4. Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 2002).
5. qtd. in Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 2002), p.13.