Close Reading Essay



Close Reading Essay

on “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

Part I: Selection and Pre-Writing

Due January 7th and 8th

Choose one of the passages from “Bartleby” listed on the reverse side of this paper. Complete numbers 1-7 on your selected passage for the next class meeting.

1. Read the passage aloud several times. Create marginalia.

2. Situate the quotation in the plot: When does this happen? Who is involved? What happens?

3. Examine diction: Which words or synonyms are repeated? Which opposites appear? Does the narrator use alliteration, assonance, or consonance in the passage? Why might the narrator (the lawyer and character, not Herman Melville the author) use such stylized language at this point in the story?

4. Examine figurative language: Identify metaphor, simile, metonym, synecdoche, and/or imagery.

5. Examine syntax: Are the sentences generally short or long? Are they straightforward and easy to understand or full of interjections and clauses? If your passage contains both long and short sentences, examine whether the sentence length varies based on the content of the sentence. Does the passage use parallel structure? Identify any other rhetorical devices we have discussed in class.

6. Examine characterization: What does the passage reveal about the character or characters involved, particularly Bartleby?

7. Look over your answers. What is revealed about the story based through the words used in this passage? Come up with some central ideas. For instance, you could address Bartleby’s motivations or the significance of his work at the Dead Letters Office. Choose your strongest idea and rewrite it into a thesis statement.

Part II: Close Reading Essay

Due January 12th

Length: 2 pages

“An explication de texte (cf. Latin explicare, to unfold, to fold out, or to make clear the meaning of) is a finely detailed, very specific examination of a short poem or short selected passage from a longer work, in order to find the focus or design of the work, either in its entirety in the case of the shorter poem or, in the case of the selected passage, the meaning of the microcosm, containing or signaling the meaning of the macrocosm (the longer work of which it is a part). To this end ‘close’ reading calls attention to all dynamic tensions, polarities, or problems in the imagery, style, literal content, diction, etc.”

– Janice Patten,

Write a 2-page essay that proves your thesis statement (# 7) using evidence found in your close reading (# 2 - 6). You must stay focused on your passage and include a close analysis of at least one individual word in addition to other elements of the passage. Each paragraph must incorporate citations.

Sample Organization:

¶ 1: Situate quotation in story (#2) and introduce how thesis relates to entire story (#7).

¶ 2-?: Identify 2-4 textual elements that support your thesis. This includes general trends like sentence structure as well as specific elements like an individual word. Write one paragraph on each to tell how that element adds to your thesis (#3 - 6). You do not need to include all answers to your pre-writing questions.

¶ Last: Sum up your argument without simply rewording your thesis. Make a final statement about how this individual passage relates to or reveals the rest of the story.

Passage Choices from “Bartleby”

1. Bartley on Sunday morning, from page 13:

Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby tenanting my law chambers of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance, yet withal firm and self-possessed, had such a strange effect upon me that incontinently I slunk away from my own door and did as desired. But not without sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener. Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness, chiefly, which not only disarmed me but unmanned me, -- as it were. For I consider that one, for the time, is sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired clerk to dictate to him and order him away from his own premises. Furthermore, I was full of uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly be doing in my office in his shirtsleeves, and in an otherwise dismantled condition, of a Sunday morning. Was anything amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the question.

2. The narrator’s acceptance of Bartleby, from pages 21-22:

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs; in short, I never feel so private as when I know you are here. At last I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact, but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office room for such period as you may see fit to remain.

3. The narrator’s indecision, from pages 22-23

What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to the last button. What shall I do? what ought I to do? What does conscience say I should do with this man, or, rather, ghost. Rid myself of him, I must; go, he shall. But how? You will not thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal -- you will not thrust such a helpless creature out of your door? you will not dishonor yourself by such cruelty? No, I will not, I cannot do that. Rather would I let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall. What, then, will you do?

4. The encounter, from page 27:

"Bartleby!"

"I know you," he said, without looking round -- "and I want nothing to say to you."

"It was not I that brought you here, Bartleby," said I, keenly pained at his implied suspicion. "And, to you, this should not be so vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass."

"I know where I am," he replied, but would say nothing more, and so I left him.

5. Dead Letters, from pages 29-30:

Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring -- the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank note sent in swiftest charity -- he whom it would relieve nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

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