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Bartleby's window has no view except the neighborning building's wall. I felt that this was a symbol for Wall Street. Melville had the prospect of working on Wall Street, but he dreaded the idea. I took the story to be that being blocked by that wall crushes Bartleby, and this reflected Melville's fear.The Lawyer had an office on Wall Street,I don't know if it has anything to do with it.
Bartleby's window has no view except the neighborning building's wall. I felt that this was a symbol for Wall Street. Melville had the prospect of working on Wall Street, but he dreaded the idea. I took the story to be that being blocked by that wall crushes Bartleby, and this reflected Melville's fear.
His refusal of the Lawyer's requests has been read as a critique of the growing materialism of American culture at this time. It is significant that the Lawyer's office is on Wall Street; in fact, the subtitle of "Bartleby" is "A Story of Wall Street." Wall Street was at this time becoming the hub of financial activity in the United States, and Melville (as well as other authors, including Edgar Allan Poe) were quick to note the emerging importance of money and its management in American life. Under this reading, Bartleby's stubborn refusal to do what is asked of him amounts to a kind of heroic opposition to economic control.
What the importance of Bartleby's priior job in the dead letter office?
items ended up in this office, where enclosed items of value..
I was thinking it had to do with his unpublished work Dead Letter Office
But inasmuch as this vague report has not been without certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration.
Nope.