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영어

This paper explores William Faulkner's and Herman Melville's narrative strategies which involve the reader in the construction of meaning in their short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” Particularly, by using a first-person narrator who tells a story about Emily and Bartleby after their death, Faulkner and Melville elaborately implicate the reader in the narrator’s ethical faults and failures; in order to go beyond such limits, the reader must carry out a self-examination which will lead to an ethical awakening and to acts on the responsibility for the other. In “A Rose for Emily,” the anonymous narrator refers to the townspeople as “we” forty-eight times, and also as “they” from time to time irregularly. Significantly, the reason of the intriguing shifting of pronouns is not clearly suggested in the story. We cannot read Miss Emily Grierson until we have interpreted the narrator, for s/he is the medium of consciousness—which cannot be objective—through whom Emily is filtered. Considering that the townspeople’s voyeuristic violence and irresponsibility toward Emily is actually overlapped with the reader’s, the multi-layered meaning of the collective “we” which obviously implicates the reader ought to be carefully scrutinized, in order not to merely focus on the “monstrosity” of Emily Grierson. In the same manner, in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the reader “I” is involved with the ethical failures of the narrator “I” in the process of reading the first-person narrator's storytelling of Bartleby. Indeed, the story tells so much more about who the “I” is rather than who Bartleby is. And, thus, the reader who comes to identify with the “I” gains some new insight into him/herself by examining what the narrator tells regarding his significant change during his narration. In this respect, the narrator’s last sentence “Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!” must be always newly interpreted in terms of the reader’s performativity. In that reading as an ethical act must always be an attempt to re-member “the other” and to trans-(re)late and to re-establish the ethical relationship with “the other,” I insist that Faulkner and Melville superbly invite the reader to share the ethical responsibility for “the other” in their novels through their elaborate narrative strategies to tell their stories of Emily and Bartleby.