Melville Stories

This is the most famous line in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," and perhaps one of the most famous lines in American literature. Whenever the Lawyer asks his scrivener Bartleby to do something, Bartleby responds, "I would prefer not to." At one point, the Lawyer questions him closely: "You will not?" and Bartleby responds, "I prefer not." The prefer, however, doesn't mean that Bartleby will do it despite his preference. Bartleby assumes a polite tone with his boss by using the term "prefer," and there is irony in the choice. If he says he "will not" do something, the Lawyer can easily interpret that as misbehavior and fire him. But as long as he says "prefer," Bartleby makes it seem as if the Lawyer is being pushy, or just asking for a favor rather than giving an order. Bartleby's response is so calm and delivered so rationally that the Lawyer briefly thinks that he himself must be the crazy one, and he has to ask his other copyists for confirmation that he's right.

These are the last lines of "Bartleby the Scrivener." The narrator (the Lawyer) has heard a rumor that Bartleby once worked in the Dead Letter section of a post office. For the Lawyer, these dead letters become a way of explaining Bartleby's nature. The Lawyer believes that the endless pile-up of sad, forgotten letters, often intended for people now dead, must have caused Bartleby to slowly withdraw from human society, perhaps even from his own existence. But it shouldn't be assumed that these dead letters simply drove Bartleby insane. Bartleby may very well have continued working if he had not lost his job due to a change in administration. It is possible that Bartleby became his job, and when he couldn't do it any more he lost his sense of purpose. Whatever the reason, the Dead Letter office is only one small clue to the Bartleby's strange behavior.

This passage is from the "second sketch" of "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Islands." It is an excellent example of Melville's language, and his ability to make the commonplace remarkable, or even mystical. Melville's diction takes a humorous scene—a tortoise hopelessly trying to walk through a ship's mast—and makes it seem like the epic, tragic struggle of a hero who has been "enchanted" and cannot figure out how to simply walk around an obstacle. However, all the mystical energy of the scene is dissipated by the last line, which is humorous and which seems to hint at a kind of universal truth. Anyone, even people, with such a "drudging impulse to straightforwardness" will find themselves facing obstacles in a "belittered world."

This quote is an example of Melville's skill with imagery and metaphor. The idea of the waves playing a "dirge" for Hunilla's husband and brother, making her think it strange that "murderers should mourn"—the poetic nature of this idea is on par with some of the best passages from Moby Dick. Such passages reveal how different "The Encantadas" is from Melville's earlier works about exotic locations (such as Typee).

This passage is also an example of prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeia is a technique in which a poet or author gives an inanimate object human qualities. In this case, the waves are both murderers and in the act of "mourning" for Hunilla's husband and brother. The concept of the living sea is a very classical one, echoing the Greek and Roman poets.

Race is one of the most significant issues of the twentieth century, and dealing with older texts is always a tricky issue. Some schools ban Huckleberry Finn for its use of the word "nigger." That word is not in "Benito Cereno," but the above passage is arguably just as offensive, if not more so. The passage is easily read as being patronizing toward the black, claiming that they as a race are particularly fit to be servants and have a "good humor" that makes them pleasant to be near. Delano's equating blacks with "Newfoundland dogs" seems to be intended to show Delano's exceptionally good opinion of blacks, but the patronizing nature of the comment is offensive to modern readers. There may be an ironic comment in the use of such an obviously degrading metaphor as "Newfoundland dogs": Melville may be making fun of those who think of blacks that way. But the passage is frustratingly ambiguous, like much of Melville's writing, and without any real understanding of Melville's opinion of blacks at this time, Melville's intentions with such a metaphor cannot be determined with any real surety.

The reader should be wary of associating the views of Captain Delano, the narrator, with those of Melville the author. But both men do have similar backgrounds: both are men from Massachusetts who have spent time on whaling ships. Much of the tone of the story is taken from the autobiography of the real-life Amasa Delano. However, Delano makes no comments like the passage above; Melville has added enormous amounts of detail to Delano's bare-bones account. Some critics have claimed that while Delano is the voice for most of the story, the last section, after the court deposition, is entirely Melville's, and it is there that the story gives its most interesting impressions of race.

This dialogue contains "Benito Cereno"'s most explicit commentary on the question of slavery. Cereno's haunting claim that "the Negro" is a "shadow" upon him raises many questions as to what the perception of blacks is within the story. Cereno now sees that blacks cannot be underestimated, and that all his life he has been underestimating them. Both he and Delano have now seen a very intelligent black, Babo, in action. Babo succeeded in controlling Cereno and fooling Delano. At the end if the story, the narrator leaves it ambiguous whether, when Cereno dies, which "leader" he is following—his friend Alexandro Aranda, or Babo, who exerted such control over him. It is also unclear whether the black shadow really represents the unjust institution of slavery itself. Perhaps Melville is saying that Cereno deserves this ending.