SOURCE: Colwell, James L., and Gary Spitzer. “‘Bartleby’ and ‘The Raven’: Parallels of the Irrational.” Georgia Review 23, no. 1 (spring 1969): 37-43.

In the following essay, Colwell and Spitzer offer a systematic comparison of parallels between Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” and Poe's “The Raven.”

I

Although Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” has been likened to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, especially “The Raven,” no one has yet extended this extremely suggestive comparison.¹ Despite what would seem to be an obvious opportunity, no one has tried to elaborate the similarity between tale and poem into a new reading of the story, the object of the present essay.

It is our contention that there is sufficient similarity in mood, content, method and structure to reward a systematic comparison of the two. Such an examination will show no direct line of...