kev- While you're "painting the board red", a Q:

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: About Bartleby's name.... : The question I have is about the name “Bartleby.” Now, you have a history of literary referenced names for characters, and I think that Bartleby is so named after the title character in the Melville story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” : See http://www.it.cc.mn.us/literature/bartleby.html : mellville's Barltleby is broken by the suffering he has seen, & refuses his duty, or to cede to the authority of those in higher stations than he. His acts of disobedience are always civil: “I prefer not to” is his phrase.The narrator of the tale is Bartleby’s employer, who, although confounded by his disobedience, always finds the room in his heart to have compassion for the silently suffering Bartleby. With a little bit of license, we can posit that Bartleby’s boss in the tale is representative of God, and that the compassion shown to him is ultimately the answer to the oft-posted board question “Is Bartleby forgiven?” The clue is in his name- the character is ultimately not so much forgiven as he is infinitely pitied… Melville’s Bartleby was driven mad with hopelessness by the endless suffering he saw working in the “dead letters” dept: : For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:--the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. : Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! : Your Bartleby is similarly concerned, and maddened, by mankind’s self-inflicted cruelties, and by want of respite from ill feelings. Both are incapable of coping with the myriad cruelties and sufferings that are a part of, in this cosmology, “God’s Larger Plan.” : Either that, or there's a guy in Red Bank named "Fred Bartelby" or something. : Is my 'No-Prize' in the mail?

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