'Bartleby' by Melville

>>9508200
The story didn't imply any of that. It's more likely either a poetic/rhetorical flourish or the fancy of the narrator.

think about it for half a second, what could the dead letter office symbolize?

>>9508200
It's letters that can't be sent. So he probably must have seen a lot of important letters that the post office, try as they might, couldn't send, letters that might've been pivotal for relationships, letters about life and death, etc. It represented an ultimate failure of society, or a social institutions, to care about and help individual people, no matter how important their letter was.

If the letter has no return address on it, for instance, as the letters that end up at DLO often do, they can't even send something back to the person to tell them their letter failed. They think their letter got through, but then they never get a response, and have no way of knowing what happened --- maybe the other person didn't respond on purpose. There's no way to notify them of their error.

>>9508214
>The story didn't imply any of that.

Yes it does. I am literally holding a copy of the story in my hands. The excerpt goes:

>"...dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters...?"

The entire last page of the story is about the narrator finding out Bartleby worked in the dead letter's office and the realization that this must have been the cause of the character's descent into despondency.

>>9508237
But that's just the narrator's assumption. The entire point of the relationship between Bartleby and the Narrator is that the Narrator fails to understand Bartleby

>>9508237
Dude, are you dense? Is English your first language? If you can't pick up on the overly-rhetorical and not-literal tone there, then you fundamentally are bad at reading. You need to read more and more varied literature. This isn't Harry Potter where you can take every sentence more or less literally.

Melville literally fucking says "dead letters" sounds like "dead men". It's a poetic touch of irony/soliloquizing, dumbass.

It doesn't matter the cause, only that he's been damaged irreparably by modernity

>>9508264
>If you can't pick up on the overly-rhetorical and not-literal tone there...

Melville's writing is overly-rhetorical to begin with.

And talk about being pretentious - the attraction of literature is that it can be vague and not have a definite answer. So get fucked, cunt.

>>9508273
butthurt brainlet bogan detected

>>9508200
I thought Bartleby had something to do with the Narrators own madness. Something about modernity and monomania in the United States.