"Bartelby, the Scriviner" is, of course, a classic. And I've read it before, so it was good to read it again. As you age and re-read things you find new things and new spins. It was good to do so. Bartleby's case saddens. But also, Bartleby needs a psychiatrist. And they don't exist in the early 1800s. I had not read "Benito Cereno." It was eye-opening. First, on the surface it may seem Melville views the slaves one way, but then you think about it and he may be having you think about the slaves another way. Second, Melville builds the mysterious tension so skillfully and for so long he makes Lovecraft or Poe seem like amateurs. You know what is coming but it keeps getting delayed delayed delayed and dismissed away dismissed away dismissed away so that as you get further into the story you're hooked. A good work, which works as a simple story and on deeper levels. This Dover Edition is easy to look at, has a mere half page of introduction, and is priced nice.

I hated Melville when I read him in high school, but after reading these two stories, I've decided that he doesn't totally suck. I enjoyed parts of them, although at times it seems like he went on longer than he really needed to. ( )

This book, with its two stories, Bartleby and Benito Cereno, is not what I expected. What a dense read! For a book just barely making it over the 100-page mark, it took me forever to will myself through it! Look at the difference between the start date and the finish for this one! Every time I picked it up I felt like I was being forced to swallow lead, or to walk a mile in a pool of TAR. I felt like I was getting nowhere, anywhere, and fast. And, to my frustrated and wry surprise, I got exactly that.

Herman Melville... I don't know what was his issue, but the man took things that could be explosive, and instead turned them into dust. If I were to choose a handful of words to describe this book, it'd be: "Dense. Gathering dust. Slowly sinking. Numbness." There was barely even the sensation of my frustrations until I reached the end of the book! It's so LOUDLY EMPTY. It's like having a block shoved through the side of your skull, one millimeter at a time, and every moment it sinks further and deeper in, you stop reacting... you lose your emotions... you stop thinking... you're just reading... you're just reading... you're just reading... you're just reading... you're ju--

You see where I'm going here?

The concepts were intriguing, I guess... *Seems a little reluctant to even give the book that* But GOD. With the way this man writes, I want to SHOOT myself to just get it over with! It's WORSE than watching paint dry! Or a snail cross the entire desert! Or having a staring contest for WEEKS ON END with a WALL. A perfectly BLANK... WHITE... WALL!!! *Flails a bit as her irritation abruptly gets the better of her* It's POINTLESS to read these books! POINTLESS! MELVILLE, HOW DARE YOU WRITE SUCH ABSTRACT INSANITY!! *Points a finger accusingly at him, breathing hard and one eye twitching uncontrollably for a moment*

Okay. That aside, this review is highly unprofessional. I cannot stand the man's writing. It's the type of book where you read it, and your brain just shuts down. Completely. There are no thoughts, no care or concern for the story or its characters: you're just dead afterwards. My friend Rain Misoa said she read Moby Dick, and after struggling through TWO of Melville's short stories, I want to whirl on her incredulously and SHAKE her, DEMANDING how she sat through that MONSTER BOOK without ending up throwing herself off of a building!! Maybe only people who enjoy the morbid "Questions about the universe" penned in the underlying tones of these stories will care, but even a philosophy dork like me can't take stuff like this. -3-;; I just refuse to.

If you want to give it a shot because it's a classic example of Melville's works, then go right ahead and be my guest, but there's no way I'm recommending this to anyone. =_e ...it hurts the brain too much. ( )

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. Bartleby, the Scrivener

Life glues us together in ways we can’t anticipate, obliging us to broaden our individual frames of reference in order to imagine the other, overcoming our self-centered blindness.
That inevitable interconnectedness is most plausible in Melville’s most enduring and intriguing short novellas Bartleby, the Scrivever and Benito Cereno.

When a New York lawyer needs to hire another copyist, it is Bartleby who responds to his advertisement, and arrives "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn."At first a diligent employee, he soon begins to refuse work, saying only "I would prefer not to." . So begins the story of Bartleby—passive to the point of absurdity yet extremely disturbing—which rapidly turns from farce to inexplicable tragedy.
The employer being a first person, conscious narrator who uses the piece of literature he composes as a means of contemplating his situation in life. It becomes clear that his use of Christian and classical imagery hints at an understanding of what is right and wrong and some –partial- awareness of his own moral deficiency.
I have to admit I was more than puzzled by this eccentric clerk, I couldn’t understand his passive refusal to work and I changed my view upon him several times along with the biased narrator, sometimes seeing him as a sort of Christ-figure or an exploited worker, others as a Thoreau-like practitioner of passive resistance.
It wasn’t until I read the last lines of the tale that the setting of the story, this business world symbolized by omnipresent Wall Street buildings surrounding the office, pinpointing the growing division between employer and employee and between the capitalist and working classes, took full force, making me ponder how the choice of one particular perspective determine the responsibility of our actions. In short, who is to blame?

In Benito Cereno we come across a naïve American sea captain who stumbles upon the remnants of a violent rebellion in a merchant Spanish vessel called San Dominick which carried black slaves, but fails to recognize the horrors that have occurred on board. Overflowing with symbolic richness and narrative complexity Melville manages to depict human depravity and moral relativism in little more than fifty pages.

"Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come." Benito Cereno

Spanish or American. Captain or slave. Black or white. How disastrous the consequences are in the way we fill out those categories. And whereas I have read some opinions emphasizing the racist stereotypes of this short story, I can advocate in saying that the patronizing and limited views of the American sea captain are all proved wrong, one by one. Also in pointing out that although the African slaves can be seen as representatives of pure evil in the brutal way they kill his white masters, Melville also shows both how the mutineers of the San Dominick abide by America’s founding principles –“Live Free or Die” – and also how the barbarism of slavery gives way to other barbaric acts. And how the use of Christian imagery adds to the indictment of European Colonization in particular and Western arrogance and racism in general.

In both stories we encounter a confident person who is unexpectedly confronted with the mysterious “other” that challenges his snug and comfortable outlook on life, testing his goodness in presenting him with morally ambiguous situations. His reactions, our reactions, need to derive far from beyond our individual self so we can embrace the different, who is starving for understanding, and become one in this richly atomized world we live in.

”But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”
“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not human.” Benito Cereno ( )

The first of the two novella’s presented is Bartleby. Bartleby is a Wall Street Scrivener in the mid 1850’s. His position, that of copier of legal proceedings, is now obsolete but in the mid 19th century it was imperative that legal documents be copied by a team of scrivener’s and then checked for accuracy. Overtime it becomes obvious that Bartleby is not a team player and his supervisor lacks the skills to take on the situation professionally. It’s an odd little story with an odd little ending but worthy of your time as there will always by Bartleby’s and ineffective supervisor’s in the world and this story is a good little exercise in “If I were in this situation I would……….”
The second story, Benito Cereno, is a wonderful piece of writing. Melville builds suspense as Captain Delano boards the troubled ship The San Dominick which is manned by Captain Cereno, a few sailors and slaves who are free to roam the ship and clean and sharpen, of all things, axes. What’s going on here? Is Cereno mad?! Is he naïve?! How could such bad luck befall one ship?! The reader will be intrigued throughout the short story and perhaps shocked to discover the truth. Truly a great read. ( )