let's talk about one of the most popular american classics i would prefer not to [Music] all right guys welcome to the codex cantina where i am oona and my middle name is almost bartleby crypto if you've been here before welcome back and if you are new we take a conversational approach to literature breaking it down and hoping to get some of the hidden nuggets and meanings that our authors spend years crafting and putting into these stories that sounds like you hit that subscribe button to join us and as always we start off with publication information partly the scrivener was published anonymously in 1853 in putnam magazine and the reason this was is because the first two major publications of mr melville were not so hot they were slammed by critics breeders didn't understand it they didn't like moby dick they didn't like billy budd and so he asked them hey i still need to get paid can you publish this anonymously so i can still have work going out there and it's kind of crazy to think that if he hadn't done that this might have been lost to obscurity and if you want to follow along with h m story here you can check out the doobly-doo down below we'll have a link for you to listen and read for free the doobly-doo that's a new one this story regardless of you know him needing to kind of like obfuscate who was writing it because he didn't think anybody would want to pick it up it's hysterical this is this is a great story that is it had me on the edge of my seat laughing sometimes my wife also looked over me when i was reading it um the second time through because i enjoyed it that much and she's like what's funny and i was like you just you gotta read this story do you think he intended it to be funny or do you think it meant to be serious for the time period of what was changing in the mid-19th century in the world you know and that's the beauty of literature is you can make it whatever makes sense for you and for me i don't know if i care if he intended it to be funny or not because it's hysterical and and to your point it's about a very serious thing like this dude's a law copy it's like what's a scrivener for people that didn't know it's a person that just kind of copies documents like writing was more common but still not as prevalent as it was today and it was a very specialized kind of like role i guess i shouldn't say specialized but it was a role to copy and it's kind of boring right yeah i mean they couldn't just use the printing press for these legal documents almost like they have to be notarized this is a very serious job a very important job for legal documents and i interpret it very funny as well and maybe that's just our perspective i don't know if old h m was trying to be funny or maybe he was i don't know yeah i'll get into it let's do plot and move on from there and and analyze the uh the scrivener out of this so our narrator a successful lawyer on wall street has three clerks that work under him we learn about each of them how they drink half the day or really young and he has more work that needs to be done and thus hires bartleby the scrivener at first bartleby does his job however soon enough he begins refusing to do certain parts of his work altogether he instead performs his dead wall reveries and stairs at the wall the narrator consults with the other clerks but fails to come to conclusion on how to get bartleby to do work he flat out refuses his requests and simply replies i simply prefer not to i would prefer not to soon the narrator decides to move his office and thus leave bartleby behind however the new tenants in the building are furious as bartleby just kind of stays there and won't leave and also refuses all of their requests soon bartleby is arrested taken to the halls of justice aka the tombs and the narrator begins to feel compassion or maybe curiosity a little bit for bartleby or guilt or guilt guilt visits him in the jail right so bartleby is free to explore the open area but simply prefers not to and just stares at the wall later the narrator visits bartleby but this time when he visits he finds him dead by the wall the narrator ponders rumors that the man was forced out of a job at the dead letter office the lawyer finishes with his line ah bartleby ah humanity i definitely want to talk about that ending sentence i'm sure everybody has their speculation but i i think that my interpretation might be a little bit different than what a lot of people because of the exclamation points in there well we might be a little bit remiss too because we started this conversation and we actually didn't tell the truth we said the story was called bartleby the scrivener but it is not it is bartleby the scrivener a wall a story of wall street so right so to your point of what did you know h m you know intend here i don't know but we have a funny story and he calls it the bartleby but is it really bartleby's story was definitely not bartleby's journey i think it's the unnamed narrator story of maybe his growth or maybe old h m is telling us what is changing in america uh is changing in the world and that how we're supposed to treat one another is is being altered by wall street and the greed or the industrialization i don't know so crypto my history teacher at this point in american history how was the country reacting to wall street it was kind of like a dichotomy really of people that were still stuck in the idea of an agrarian society versus the idea of industrialization as we're moving forward we're going to get trained soon we're going to get cars electricity the the world is really ramping up faster in the large cities and in the urban areas those are changing drastically but in the rural areas not so much and there is kind of this not battle per se but this definitely changing in american culture and ideology in the early to mid 19th century to your point where we've started to get somewhere awards but but they're not prevalent yet and a lot of americans some not all but but a lot of americans are opposed to the idea of centralized banking and wall street's becoming this central area where that's happening yeah and to your point of that that there is this increase in the idea of an organized society outside of farming is more and more people young men and especially young women are leaving the farms they're tired of working for mommy and daddy and being stuck on the farm with their 15 brothers and sisters they're moving to the big city and what are they doing they're getting jobs and these new factories and becoming a cog in the wheel just you know another you know rut in the machine and that can be very daunting on somebody's psyche and it can be you know frustrating to be stuck in that you know seamless job that just doesn't go anywhere and maybe that's what you know herman here is trying to tell this that we really need to be connected as people together at least that's how i interpret it of the narrator trying to help bartleby throughout the story multiple times he tries to help him and what is bartleby's response every single time i simply prefer not to and that's what vex is our narrator too because you said he's trying to help and i don't disagree with that at certain points but i think even more prevalent is the narrator's trying to understand barnaby how can this guy just say no because he's almost like afraid to make decisions you'll notice he won't fire these guys that are drunk half the time that you know you have this turkey and nippers crack me up it's like they're the same person like it reversed at different times of the day it's hilarious they they carry the story twiddley and tweedledum right for sure oh yeah and then you've got the young boy who didn't even make a choice to go work here like his parents set him here there's a lot of people not making choices in this and even as bartleby makes the choice to not do anything what does the boss do he's like well i think i should fire him but does he come out and do it like he's got to have like a meeting and like hey guys what do you think about this like even him lacks the choice and i think this speaks to that idea of as you're saying they're all cogs in the machine they're all doing their part they don't get to make a choice they've got a role they have to fulfill and they perform that yeah it makes me think is the narrator jealous of bartleby is what is his fascination with him that bartleby can just not care about these things when it's like no the american ideas you get a job and you earn money and you take care of your family and you move up move up move up move up and bartleby's just like i prefer not to i'm happy i'm content where i am and as like a young ravenous american you know lawyer moving up in the you know grand scheme of things in american business world he can't fathom that he struggles with that now some critics have pointed out that while you know moby dick is his his you know magnum opus as you pointed out as a failure at the time critics have commented that could this be a commentary on melville himself wanting to write you these big epic philosophical books that he wasn't able to you know adventure stories were popular at the time he was being forced to read this a common way that a lot of critics kind of attacked this on top of being the cog on the wheel is is he being forced into being that cog and he can't do the things that he wants to like write the big epic moby dicks that nobody wants to buy at least at the time for sure yeah and if you kind of think of it that there's these two different personalities of uh you know a younger america versus maybe an older america maybe not necessarily like an age age thing but bartleby is kind of playing it safe and he's taking the easiest path the path of least resistance and melvin himself is not he's challenging he's writing these stories that people aren't used to reading and he's not getting anywhere with it and that's kind of the same with our unnamed narrator here too and that just difference of personalities and i think the what they want out of life ideologies is very very uh disparaging i guess between bartleby and the narrator so something else that kind of pops up a lot is dead like the the feeling of dead characters being described as dead bartleby with his dead wall reveries it's all over the place did you have much of a takeaway on that one oh yeah i loved how ghostly descriptive this story is if i hadn't known better i would almost think that this was some sort of horror story throughout their uh quote it says i'm going upstairs to my old haunt it's even described bartleby as haunting this place the way he's described is very gaunt and you know his slender cheekbones and uh his pale complexion there is a lot of symbology and adjective descriptors in here almost giving it that you know ghost story horror-esque what's interesting too is there's a couple of religious references in here um i'm not sure everybody would pick up on them but of course there's the usual uh three that you see a lot of places how many clerks were there before bartleby there were three how many days did bartleby meditate on a suggestion from the narrator it's three and one of the last lines near the epilogue here we have ah he's asleep amy with kings and counselors murmured i which is of course a reference to the book of job now if you read the book of job do you well do you recall kind of what's happening at that point in time oh man isn't that like the oldest book in the bible i can't remember that far back it's worth mentioning at this point in the bible when this this line comes up job hadn't spoken for seven days and seven nights he was almost on this protest in the same way that bartleby just refused to acknowledge and engage with people like some people have even talked about from a criticism standpoint is bartleby meant to represent civil disobedience right like just refusing to go along with being the cog in the wheel uh he's even like a pro like a protester staying still and not moving the cops have to come and remove him like again very different times between now and them but you have those comparisons well job was on a similar journey he hadn't spoken for seven days seven nights until finally at this moment this comes up and he starts to question death and again we have all these reference to death in this story too yeah for sure because this is the chapter in which job wished he had never been born he considers the vanniness the he considers the vanity and the emptiness of the lives of the folks that are dead and the kings and the castles that have come to ruin you can't take your castle with you it sits in ruins what do you do with your riches your riches can't come with you to heaven and that sort of thing and this is important because it's starting to appear to job that death is the great equalizer right and to me bartleby is going through this similar journey where he's starting to see death everywhere and he's starting to realize that why be a cog in the wheel and have you know basically the same thing that would happen to a king who is rich and i think this is again not totally supported in the text so we're stepping outside a little bit but why put this book of job reference here i think we're meant to maybe look at bartleby in the sense of is he trying to step out of that role and make more out of his life and put value into his life because he knows that death is the one thing we can't escape we all must face it at some point in our lives but there is a spot inside of the story where at the very end they're they're talking and the narrator says and see it's not so sad a place as one might think look there's the sky and here's the grass and you said that he just stares at the wall and he does actually reply and he says i know where i am and earlier in the story one of the clerks had said i think sir he's a little loony but bartleby seems to understand his plight he seems to understand what's going on with him it's just nothing in the world excites him anymore and i don't know how to take that now to the other point you made i do agree 100 there's a lot of of death imagery it's abundant throughout the entire story yeah and you mentioned in the plot summary that where do they take him the tombs you know where you would put you know an egyptian mummy or something so there is all this this haunting and this dark thing as we learn what happened to bartleby in his life he lost his job that was you know maybe near and dear to him and that broke him and that happened a lot to people on wall street where their job was their entire identity and when they lost that job they lost who they were and maybe that's what happened to bartleby and maybe it's kind of a lesson here that old h m is giving us of you know don't be just one thing you have to open up yourself to maybe being a little bit more at least that's kind of how i took it especially with that last line um you know ah bartleby all the humanity and i know there's an exclamation point there but i don't think he was exclaiming it i think that he was focusing inward of i've learned a lesson here from this man and it cost him his life for me to learn this lesson so that's a good question what do you guys out there think was the big lesson that you took away from this we'd love to hear from you down below again we're going to leave a playlist down below where we will be tackling moby dick in the future so depending on when you're watching this video we we may be sailing the seas with h m here that sounds like you we'd love to check it out let's move into our final thoughts crypto what do you think about this one uh no number for me i think this one is a masterpiece by a master author i know we don't give out a lot of numbers anymore and maybe that you know is for a good thing uh this is worth a read i think this is a fantastic story it's funny and you know that we are always going to give positive praise when a story is funny because that's something that you have to allow yourself to do is laugh at these stories and as we were talking about them i just you know i keep giggling to myself on the inside of old turkey and nippers and you know them just acting shenanigans i if i had to sum up this story imagine one part office space where they can't kick a guy out because he's too crazy and the other one is these wooffle wall street guys in the the office just making all these shenanigans that are making everybody laugh and have a great time so it's worth checking out so recommend it if you will guys we appreciate you spending some time with us today we post videos every monday and thursday hit that subscribe button to join us on the journey out peace or i would rather not