Critical Essay | Critical Essay by H. Bruce Franklin

Critical Essay by H. Bruce Franklin

SOURCE: "Worldly Safety and Other-worldly Saviors," in The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology, Stanford University Press, 1963, pp. 126-52.

Franklin is an American critic with a special interest in the work of Herman Melville. In the following excerpt, he interprets "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as a religious allegory, particularly emphasizing Christian and Hindu motifs in the story.

There are essentially three ethics available to man—action in and of the world, action in the world for other-worldly reasons, and nonaction, that is, withdrawal from the world. We might call the extreme of the first the ethic of Wall Street, the extreme of the second the ethic of Christ, and the extreme of the third the ethic of the Eastern monk. Wall Street's ethic seeks the world as an end; Christ's ethic prescribes certain behavior in this world to get to a better world; the Eastern monk's ethic seeks to escape all...
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