{"id":1381,"date":"2010-03-05T13:37:51","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T17:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1381"},"modified":"2010-03-05T13:37:51","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T17:37:51","slug":"finally-a-reliable-narrator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1381","title":{"rendered":"Finally, a reliable narrator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Besides having a completely different subject, I found that <em>Bartleby the Scrivener<\/em> also differed from <em>Moby Dick<\/em> in its narration style.\u00a0 Ishmael is very present at the beginning of <em>Moby Dick<\/em>, but his voice becomes increasingly disembodied as the novel continues.\u00a0 The unnamed lawyer narrator remains present throughout <em>Bartleby<\/em>, and readers follow him through all his various interactions with other characters.<\/p>\n<p>Ishmael does not interact much with other characters after he arrives on the Pequod.\u00a0 While his voice continues to inform the reader of what is happening on the ship, we rarely get an actual glimpse of him.\u00a0 He appears briefly in such chapters as <em>The Monkey-Rope<\/em> and <em>A Squeeze of the Hand<\/em>.\u00a0 Yet he still does not enter into dialogue with anyone aboard the ship.\u00a0 The most dialogue that Ishmael engages in during the part of the book that he is on the ship happens when he is having a flash forward to later describing the Town-Ho\u2019s story to friends in Lima.\u00a0 Ishmael as a body aboard the ship seems to disappear from the story entirely until the Epilogue.\u00a0 He does not even alert the reader that he was one of the men on Ahab\u2019s boat until after the ship has sunk.<\/p>\n<p>The narrator of <em>Bartleby <\/em>has conversations with numerous other people in the text, and often uses the pronoun \u201cI\u201d to describe his personal thoughts and feelings.\u00a0 His constant flow of opinions and theories regarding Bartleby\u2019s condition contrasts sharply with the reader\u2019s lack of insight into Bartleby\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed reading a piece by Melville where the narrator remained consistent for the duration of the plot.\u00a0 The narrator was as reliable as Bartleby was unreliable as an employee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Besides having a completely different subject, I found that Bartleby the Scrivener also differed from Moby Dick in its narration style.\u00a0 Ishmael is very present at the beginning of Moby Dick, but his voice becomes increasingly disembodied as the novel continues.\u00a0 The unnamed lawyer narrator remains present throughout Bartleby, and readers follow him through all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,1],"tags":[308,162,133],"class_list":["post-1381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-narrative","category-uncategorized","tag-bartleby","tag-ishmael","tag-narrator"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1381"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1384,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions\/1384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}