Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is secretly about Cotton-Eyed Joe. We often talk about how poems resemble songs, so why can't the plots of short stories do the same? In the case of "Bartleby", I think that he as a person can easily be likened to our dear old pal CE Joe. We don't know where he came from, we don't know where he went (in the biblical sense). He has an air of mystery about him. He messes with the narrator's personal life. I know that this is silly, but I think it's fun to relate things that you don't necessarily enjoy to things that you do. If anyone can think of other parallels between the two, please feel free to comment them below.
This week in class, we discussed Kawabata's "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket". Last week, we discussed a poem about kelp. In both cases, relationships/people are compared to these mundane creatures. This begs the question: how do you know if you're a cricket or kelp? Essentially, a cricket is something truly special; it's the end all be all person that you've been searching for and are lucky to have. Kelp means you allow someone to take what they want from you, leave, and come back as they please. Basically, kelp=doormat. But, how do you know if you're being treated like this? How do you know when you're a kelp when you think that you've been giving yourself freely but you've really been "being gathered" in a way? And what if you spend all your life thinking you're a cricket but you're actually a grasshopper? Or vice versa? And which would be worse? What if you really are a cricket and you end up with a grasshopper that t...
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