The Piazza Tales Literature and Writing Quotes

This is a quotation from Shakespeare's Cymbeline; the speaker is saying he'll put flowers on the grave of Fidele. It's a kind of eulogy, so you could see it as the narrator mourning, or eulogizing, Mariana. But Mariana isn't dead; she's just someone the narrator made up. So the quotation is also a tip off; the narrator is using a literary allusion to mourn, or memorialize, his own literary creation. (Also, it's just a fancy, flowery way to start off what's going to be a fancy, flowery story. You could see it as a warning; "if you don't like fancy and flowery, get out now.")

The romantic poet Byron was known for his adventurousness and unconventionality. He seems the opposite of the staid, boring Bartleby. But Bartleby won't examine law documents either. Maybe he's more Byronic than he looks.

Bartleby is a sad sack as a writer—but on the other hand, he seems to have the gift of coining a memorable phrase. He should have been a pop song writer, maybe (though he'd probably prefer not to.)

The dead letter office is for letters that are undeliverable. The narrator conflates that with actual dead people. This blurs the line between writing and reality—a line which gets smudgy in other places in the collection as well. Bartleby is character and writer; you could see him as writing himself, a self-penned letter that never gets delivered.

Don Benito is the inventor of the tale here—and he is in fact telling his story for evil purposes. The actual author of that story, though, is not Don Benito, but Babo. Don Benito is not only telling the story; he's a character in it.

There are lots of quotations from Spenser's The Fairie Queene in "The Encantadas." They emphasize the fact that the Galapagos are strange, distant, and separate from every day experience, just like fairyland. At the same time, though, Spenser's rich fairy world is meant to contrast with the bleak, distant, blighted Galapagos.

Mount Pisgah is supposed to be the mountain Moses climbed to see the Promised Land. So this is an ironic or cutesy reference. You climb up to the top of a big rock in the Galapagos, and you don't see a land flowing with milk and honey, but a lot of barren rocks and a few tortoises.

This is a reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest; the evil Caliban, who lived on the island, was the child of the witch Sycorax. So this is a complicated way of saying that Oberlus is a monster and a meany. He could have just said, "Oberlus is a monster and a meany," but Melville lives for the Shakespeare reference.

This is another kind of dead letter office; little messages in bottles left throughout the Galapagos. Humans are trying to make the Galapagos theirs in part by writing on them. This is what Melville's doing too; he's writing on the Galapagos in this very story. His story lasted longer than those bottles with the sticks rotting away. That's why he's a great writer rather than some exiled pirate dude.

Melville ends "The Bell Tower" with a proverb…or a cliché, if you're less charitable. Ending with a familiar moral like this makes "The Bell Tower" seem like a fable. It's not something that really happened, but an improving story, put together with maybe a little flaw at the end, like the flaw in the bell.