Analysis Of The Ending Of Bartleby: The Death
A 4-5 page essay, typed double-spaced, with numbered pages, with your name and your TA's name on the cover, and with a vivid and telling title defining your focused thesis. Goal: to analyze one narrowly defined but pivotal aspect of any one work on the syllabus. To develop a loaded argument in such short space, you will have to distill your thoughts. Avoid excessive generality; don't try to cover everything about your work. Define a specific issue in your introduction, and then hone in on that specific point through the rest of your essay. The points you make should develop out of carefully elaborated examples from the text, and should involve not only what is said but how it is said (with reference to narrative devices, point-of-view, tone, imagery, and so on). The goal here is to develop your own powerfully elaborated argument; reading other literary critics is not required and citing critics will not in itself earn you extra credit. But reading literary criticism is often stimulating and may very often help you to push your own points further. Also, you may feel that you can treat one work more clearly by contrasting it with another. Fine-- but this will make the definition of a narrow point for comparison all the more crucial. In such a case, perhaps one work can serve as an introductory foil, while the other gets the more detailed analysis.
Analyze the ending of “Bartleby.” Is this Dead Letter ending put forth as a moment of successful closure, summarizing all previous story elements and solving its problems? Or does it work more as a Dead Letter itself—foregrounding the crisis of narrative closure and communication brought on by this encounter with Bartleby? Does the narrator come to some new revelation or understanding here? Does he seem to have been moved to true gestures of empathy and “hospitality”?