The Piazza Tales Exile Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #1

It informed me that the writer had sent to the police, and had Bartleby removed to the Tombs as a vagrant. (2.216)

The Tombs is a jail in Manhattan, so Bartleby has been carted off to prison. Bartleby doesn't really have any right or claim to the offices he was squatting in—but still, they were his home by default, and being sent to prison is being exiled from home. Or you could see it as just emphasizing the fact that he never had a home in the first place. Office-workers can spend more time at work than home; if you want to be all depressing about it, working is a kind of exile from home too.

Quote #2

…that the negresses used their utmost influence to have the deponent made away with…and before the engagement with the boats, as well as during the action, they sang melancholy songs to the negroes, and that this melancholy tone was more inflaming than a different one would have been, and was so intended… (3.410)

Why melancholy songs? Don Benito in his deposition says they sang melancholy songs to make the men fight more viciously. But maybe they're singing melancholy songs because they're far from home, and they realize that they're never going to get back. Don Benito's a racist; he can't see the black people as human, and therefore isn't able to realize that they're exiles, who have every reason to be sad.

Quote #3

Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites….(3.433)

Babo is killed, his body mutilated, and his head set out on a pike for strangers to gawk at. How do they bury people in his country? What prayers should be said over him? The whites don't care. He's murdered far from home, and dies an exile.