How It All Goes Down
"The Piazza"
Our narrator—who is sort of an analogue of Melville—buys a house in Massachusetts (this is Melville's house Arrowhead). The narrator wants a piazza (or porch) on it, but doesn't have one. So he gets a porch built. Then he sits on the porch and looks out over the landscape. He has a daydream about going out into the mountains and meeting an isolated woman named Marianna, who is lonely, and looks at his house from afar and imagines he's happy. Then the daydream ends and he's back on his porch, feeling sorry for himself.
Every person who has ever read this story has wished he or she could fly out on fairy dust into the mountains, find Melville's sweet, fragrant house, and give Melville a swift kick in the pants.
"Bartleby" (also known as, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street")
The narrator, a lawyer, hires a new copyist named Bartleby. Bartleby is a good, quick copyist, but whenever asked to do something out of the way of his usual duties, he says, "I prefer not to." The narrator, confronted with this rank insubordination, does nothing—and soon Bartleby is living in the offices and refusing to copy anything or do anything except stare at the wall. You could almost turn this into a how-not-to-manage course.
The narrator takes a firm stand and fires Bartleby. Bartleby just stays there. Driven to extreme measures, the narrator decides to move his offices altogether, leaving Bartleby behind. The person who takes the offices is a lot less forgiving than the narrator, and calls the police, who take Bartleby to prison as a vagrant. The narrator visits him there once…and then on the second visit, Bartleby has starved himself to death. The narrator feels bad for Bartleby, and for all of humanity. (He still doesn't take a management course, though.)
Or, shorter version: Bartleby does nothing, with surprising stubbornness, until he manages to arrange matters so he need never do nothing again.
Benito Cereno
"Benito Cereno" is based on a true story; it's adapted from Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels, though Melville fiddled with it a bit.
In Melville's version, Captain Amasa Delano is sailing off of Chile in his ship The Bachelor's Delight when he comes upon a floating Spanish ship, the San Dominick, commanded by Don Benito Cereno. The ship has been wrecked, becalmed, and wracked with fever and scurvy—it's a hot mess. Many men have died, though many of the black slaves have survived, and are all on deck. Delano comes onboard to offer water, food, and provisions to Don Benito, who seems ill and weird, but is luckily supported by his trusty servant, Babo.
But, actually, all of that is completely false (psych!) In truth, the ship was taken over in mid-voyage by the slaves, led by Babo. Everything's a mess because lots of sailors were killed in the revolt and supplies were lost as well. Cereno isn't ill and weird; he's terrified. Babo makes him pretend like he's still in command, but if he makes a misstep, or Delano suspects anything, Babo will kill Cereno, and Delano too.
So, does Delano suspect? He goes back and forth; he thinks something seems odd, but then he can't figure out what. He is not the brightest pencil in the sea—and also, he's racist, so he can't imagine that the black people would be smart enough to pull something like this off.
Babo actually hoped to take over Delano's ship…but at the last minute, Cereno leaps into Delano's boat as it pulls away, and the whole plot is uncovered. The slaves don't have any firearms, and though they fight valiantly, the Americans eventually take the ship, kill many of the black people, and capture the rest. In the process, they kill several of the remaining Spanish sailors by accident. Whoops.
So the blacks, including Babo, are executed; Cereno himself dies not too long afterwards of shock and general unhappiness. Babo's head is stuck on a pike. Delano, the dumb-as-a-post American, lives on. Let freedom ring.
The Lightning-Rod Man
During a terrible thunderstorm, the narrator hears a knock on the door. A lightning-rod salesman comes in. He tries to warn the narrator that he's going to be fried to a burnt crisp by a lightning strike if he doesn't buy a lightning rod. The narrator sneers at him, the lightning-rod guy attacks, the narrator overpowers him and kicks him out. The end.
Seriously, that's it. That's all that happens. Melville just wanted to write a story about how he hates door-to-door salesman. And who can blame him?
The Encantadas, or The Enchanted Isles
This isn't really a short piece of fiction. Instead, it's a piece of travel writing about the Encantadas, or the Galapagos. As such, it's mostly description, with some amusing anecdotes tossed in.
The main point of the piece is that the Encantadas are isolated, dry, lonely, and awful. Also, there are turtles. (If we knew what sound a turtle makes, we'd insert that here.)
(Oh wait, here's a happy 100-year-old Galapagos Turtle grunting. Ain't the internet amazing?)
In terms of the anecdotes Melville tells, there's one story about a Creole who ruled Charles's island, but was overthrown because he was mean, leaving the lawless rioters to enjoy the place by themselves. There's also a story about Hunilla, a woman who went to an island to turtle hunt with her brother and husband, was stranded, and then got rescued. And there's a story about the hermit Oberlus, who attacked people, enslaved a handful, escaped his island, and eventually got thrown in prison.
And that's about it for plot. The story also has a lot of quotes from Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queen, because The Fairie Queen is about fairies, and the islands are called "The Enchanted Islands". Get it?
Chapter Six: The Bell-Tower
Bannadonna, an ambitious, perhaps mad architect, decides to build a gigantic bell-tower. While forging the bell, he gets angry at a workman, and bashes him to death with a ladle. No one cares, because workmen are a dime a dozen, and there is only one Bannadonna. What they don't know, though, is that a piece of ladle got off, went into the bell, and caused a flaw, which Bannadonna covers up because he's a jerk as well as a murderer.
Bannadonna then makes some secret mechanism, which he won't disclose to anyone, not even the chief magistrate, who comes calling at the belfry. On the day the bell is to be rung, nothing happens. The townspeople go up to the belfry, and find that Bannadonna has been killed by his human-like mechanism, which was supposed to bash the bell, but instead bashed Bannadonna by accident. At Bannadonna's funeral, the bell is rung, but because of the flaw it breaks. Then a year later there's an earthquake and the tower itself falls. The moral of the story? Don't be a prideful, murderous jerk like Bannadonna. Or maybe don't get caught in a mediocre gothic story by Melville; take your pick.