1) Plato’s theory of the Allegory of the Cave suggest that it is better to be the just man who encounters countless sufferings than the unjust man living life ignorantly. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” by Herman Melville, Bartleby witnesses the truth of his life and job, but is he considered to be the ultimate ‘just’ man that Plato refers to?
2) In Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” he creates Bartleby to be a very different person from society; basically as an outcast. Since the scene take place in Wall Street, it is like a maze that Bartleby must navigate around. This is like the Minotaur Labyrinth. Bartleby’s life in a sense can be summed up like the maze in the Minotaur. Society is like the monster, Minotaur that he is trying to run away from, yet he cannot escape it no matter how hard he tries. In the Minotaur’s Labyrinth, nothing could defeat the monster, is that how Bartleby ultimately felt? Did he also feel that when he tried to fight back it was in a sense pointless because there was no way of ever winning against society?
-Kelly Kay
The first question is direct and straightforward. Honestly, I wouldn’t think of Bartleby when it came to Plato’s theory, but this question seems fitting for Bartleby. One can spin the question to fit either side of ‘just’ or ‘unjust man.’ Some may argue that his civil disobedience towards the world depicts him as a just man. On the other hand, the idea that he didn’t do anything to stop his misery is ignorant. The metaphor of the labyrinth to compare Bartleby is clever. Readers can easily connect to the idea that Bartleby’s life is a maze. Each character may go through a different adventure, the ultimate question is, do we ever escape the maze? Does escaping the maze mean we won or accepted defeat? This could be a guiding question to analyze Bartleby.
I also think that these two theories fit Bartleby perfectly. Like the escaper in Plato’s theory, Bartleby, is also an outsider who is completely different from his fellows. This similarity makes it suitable for us to compare them to find out if in the end, Bartleby succeeded in being the “just” man as the escaper did. For the second question, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to regard the world around Bartleby as a maze. Visually, almost the whole story happened inside the building, where there are endless well organized walls and stairs and ceilings and floors. Whether he escaped or not is also a good topic to discuss, it is also a question about: Is he always a fighter who was resisting all the time to get the meaning of life, or is he a philosophically old man who already knows the meaning of life? Was he doing everything he think he can do or, was he doing nothing?
Also, the “repetition” in Bartleby reminds me of Camus’s Sisyphus, which I think would also be a good journey model to analyze Melville’s punk.
Zeyu.