Walt Whitman and Herman Melville Essay

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Whitman uses simile effectively ("The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings") and uses metaphors effectively to link himself with others that have crossed the river in the past ("The dark threw its patches down upon me also…") because he certainly wasn't and isn't perfect at all so he had a metaphor for that ("I too knitted the old knot of contrariety…"). Melville's narrator, whose work is brilliant but a bit tedious, can slip personification, a metaphor and a simile into the same sentence for effect. For example, talking about Turkey, a previous employee ("a temperate young man") the narrator explains that "…nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless." Melville's narrator seems to have an obsession to either understand Bartleby, or at least be able to rationalize the young man's behavior, because prior to Bartleby's appearance in the shop the narrator had an even keeled life and everything was out on the table. No mysteries, just the day-to-day routine, and then this young many comes alone to stir things up and make the narrator a frustrated supervisor. Whitman meanwhile is looking back on his life, as if to make sure he fully understands where he was and why he is where he is now. "The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, the cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting." Readers don't know anything about the Melville narrator aside from his response to Bartleby and to the others working for him in the shop. The mysteries for Melville's narrator go further than just why Bartleby won't participate fully with his boss; in fact, using another metaphor, the narrator says that Bartleby "was a perpetual sentry in the corner."

Isn't it odd that Bartleby never eats dinner, in fact eats nothing but ginger nuts? Or is that all the narrator knows about the young man? As the story progresses it is apparent that the narrator has made peace with himself over Bartleby's reticence to be a normal employee.

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"He means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence… his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated," the narrator writes. The author in this story is showing tolerance and the ability to change, because in the beginning it seemed likely that Bartleby wasn't going to make it unless he made some adjustments to the narrator; but in fact the narrator has made adjustments to Bartleby shows something about Melville. What is interesting in Whitman's poem is that in the middle he begins to tell the reader a lot about himself. The author is telling the reader about his life but he apparently didn't tell the young men he saw on the ferry boat or in the street anything about him: "…yet never told them a word, lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping…The same old role, the role that is what we make it." We know very little about Melville's narrator, but in a veritable tsunami of personal feelings and confessions we learn a lot about Whitman and his life and times.

Conclusion

The Whitman piece begins with ferryboat descriptions, wonderfully imagined images and memories as the boat moves through the water. And then about half way through Whitman changes tone and reveals a lot about himself. Melville's narrator, meanwhile, beats his head against the wall trying to extract information from Bartleby, albeit the development of character in Melville's piece is excellent and the story telling is world class. I liked both stories, but Whitman has always been a favorite and his work is more interesting to explore than this particular piece by Melville......

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