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Bartleby and Benito Cereno

Bartleby and Benito Cereno

Two memorable and stirring works—first written as magazine pieces and later published in The Piazza Tales. “Bartleby,” (also called “Bartleby the Scrivener”) is a haunting moral allegory set in the business world of 19th-century New York. “Benito Cereno,” a harrowing tale of slavery and revolt aboard a Spanish ship, is regarded by many as Melville’s finest short story.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars quick and entertaining read
Bartleby is a quick entertaining read about the breakdown between employee/employer relationships.

4 Stars Follow your leader. I would prefer not to
Benito Cereno is a brilliant story of deception. It makes the reader relentlessly guessing what is really going on and what happened to the inmates of the shipwreck ‘San Dominick’.

Unfortunately, it is a racist tale. Herman Melville accepts without discussion the 19th century belief in the superiority of the white man.

The black inmates are characterized as ‘the docile arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind … undisputable inferiors.’

They are crushed by the good whites personified in Captain Delano, ‘a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature … a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception’.

More, the story exposes his author as a true calvinist, a fatalist: ‘All is owing to Providence!’, also the macabre message on the prow of the shipwreck ‘follow your leader’ (to be killed).

On the contrary, ‘Bartleby’ is a profoundly modern tale.

The strange behaviour of its main character ‘Bartleby’ can be described as ‘perfectly harmless passivity’ : ‘I would prefer not to.’

The reason for this behaviour lays in the fact that Bartleby was suddenly removed out of the ‘Dead Letter’ office in Washington after a reorganization.

‘Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? … Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring … a banknote … he whom it would relieve nor eats nor hungers anymore … on errands of life, these letters speed to death.’

Bartleby had hope. He had a job, albeit a ‘catastrophic’ one. But he himself became the victim of a catastrophe. He lost his job, his hope. He became a stoic.

Bartleby is the personification of humanity’s lost hopes: ‘Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!’

5 Stars Bartleby , the Underground Man, The Overcoat
This review is of one of the long stories, or novellas that constitute this volume, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ , and not of ‘ Benito Cereno’. ‘Bartleby’is one of the great pieces of American and of Existensial Literature. It’s hero, ‘ Who prefers not to’ in some way compares with those other lonely nineteenth century city-dweller isolatos, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and Gogol’s Akakay Akakayevitch. He too has a cousin in much of Kafka’s literature perhaps most especially in ‘The Metamorphosis’.

The good- natured lawyer narrator, the employer of Bartleby who tells the story would seem to come from a world of ordinary pleasures, family and understanding. Thus his amazement at the worldless Bartleby who cannot say ‘yes’ to anything even kindness or human consideration.

Bartleby says ‘ no’ and in saying ‘ no’ he somewhow hangs on to, and affirms his own distinct identity and individuality. He is in one sense the anti- hero whose integrity is simply in refusing to follow and obey convention and the ordinary temptations of mankind.

At the same time he is obviously a no-body and a nothing, one who by saying ‘no’ also denies his own common humanity.

One of the paradoxes of this great story is the somewhat majestic , humorous and ironic tone of the narrator who so calmly presents a tale of isolation bordering on horror.

Close to one- hundred years later a writer far more popular in his time than Melville managed to be in his , J.D. Salinger would present in Holden Caulfield another example of the American naysayer to Society’s demands, and hypocrisies. Old Holden however as opposed to Bartleby will be ‘ quite articulate’. When he prefers not to he will tell us all about it. Enigmatic Bartleby on the other hand charms us by his silence, and his one- track refusal to compromise. He seems to say to us , that even if we think we understand him, we cannot.

And this too is part of this work’s special mystery and power.

1 Star What a waste
Congratulations Herman Melville - you have a good vocabulary and know how to describe a setting.

Benito Cereno was a waste of my life. Yes, the story is interesting and political and provocative but it could have easily been condensed by 50 pages. The build up is completely unnecessary. if you are desparate to read this book, read only the first 15 and last 15 pages

4 Stars Benito Cereno
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno is a story about a Spanish slave ship taken captive, and the unfortunate American whaling ship that discovers them. The American Captain, Amasa Delano, and his crew cross paths with the Spanish slave ship, the San Dominick in a bay off the coast of the island of Santa Maria. Captain Delano is immediately astonished at the disrepair of the San Dominick, and especially at the poor health and mental condition of her captain, Benito Cereno. Captain Delano’s emotional reactions to what he witnesses while aboard the San Dominick; curiosity, anxiety, and suspicion are excellently described by Melville. Throughout his stay on the San Dominick, Delano is constantly worried that Cereno is planning to attack him, and the liberty the slaves seem to enjoy concerns him as well. The story of Benito Cereno will keep you guessing until the final pages when the mystery of the San Dominick’s crew and cargo is unveiled. Despite difficult language, I would recommend this to anyone looking for a great adventure story.

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One Billion Customers

One Billion Customers

The promise and perils-mostly the latter-that Western businesses face in China’s huge but chaotic market are probed in this illuminating if not quite reassuring primer. Ex-Wall Street Journal China bureau chief McGregor presents a series of case studies from capitalism’s Wild East, including a rocky joint venture between Morgan Stanley and a Chinese bank; the rise and fall of a Chinese peasant turned billionaire smuggler; Rupert Murdoch’s travails in bringing a satellite TV network to China; and a muck-raking Chinese financial journalist’s battles with both government censorship and the private media’s cozy relationships with advertisers. He caps each chapter with gleanings of wisdom (”assume your procurement department is corrupt until proven innocent”) and pointers on such topics as which bribes are ethically acceptable (expenses-paid junkets to America “with generous opportunities for tourism and relaxation”) and which are not (suitcases full of cash). McGregor writes with the confidence of an old China hand, occasionally lapsing into generalities about Asian “shame-based” cultures, but generally treating the Chinese businesspeople he profiles with the same sympathy and insight he accords Westerners. Still, the picture he paints of the Chinese economy is a daunting one, ruled by over-mighty Communist officials, bribe-hungry bureaucrats, Byzantine regulations and a murky, cut-throat business culture structured by personal and family ties. Westerners contemplating a plunge into this shark tank will profit from McGregor’s cautionary tales.
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Charlie Rose Walter Mossberg Ken Auletta January 23 2008

Charlie Rose Walter Mossberg Ken Auletta January 23 2008

A discussion about Macworld with Walter Mossberg, principal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. || A discussion about Google and emerging technology with Ken Auletta of The New Yorker.

This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com’s standard return policy will apply.

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