The Invisible Intruder: An Analysis of Bartleby’s Tragedy 
from a Marxism Perspective

Chenchen Lin

doi:10.70711/rcha.v2i12.6324

The Invisible Intruder: An Analysis of Bartleby’s Tragedy from a Marxism Perspective

Chenchen Lin

Abstract

Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener has invited numerous discussions among critics, and the text is understood with mainly three theories, i.e. gender criticism, psychoanalytic criticism and Marxist criticism. Based on careful textual analysis, the author of this paper is trying
to illustrate the reason accounting for Bartleby’s death. According to the reading and understanding, the author of this paper tends to attribute
Bartleby’s miserable death to the incessant intrusion from others under the hypocritical mask.

Keywords

Marxist criticism; Unreliable speaker; Intrusion

Full Text:

PDF

Included Database

References

[1] Edelman, Lee. Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities. History of the Present. 2023; 3(1): 99-118.

[2] Goldfarb, Nancy D. Charity as Purchase Buying Self-Approval in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. Nineteenth-Century Literature.

2014; 69(2): 233-261.

[3] Marcus, Mordecai. Melville’s Bartleby as a Psychological Double. College English. 1962; 23(5): 365-68.

[4] Marx, Leo. Melville’s Parable of the Walls. The Sewanee Review. 1953; 61(4): 602-627.

[5] Melville, Herman. Bartleby, The Scrivener: A story Of Wall-street. The Piazza Tales, 1856. 10 May.2018 web

edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf>.

[6] Pinsker, Sanford. “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Language as Wall. College Literature.1975; 2(1): 17-27.

[7] Sanderlin, Reed. A Reexamination of the Role of the Lawyer-narrator in Melville’s “Bartleby”. Interpretations. 1978; 10(1): 49-55.

[8] Thompson, Graham. “Dead Letters!... Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. Journal of American Studies. 2000 34(3): 395-411.

[9] Zhu Gang. Twentieth Century Western Critical Theories. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2001.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/rcha.v2i12.6324

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.