Bartleby, the Scrivener

About Bartleby the Scrivener

Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest novel in English. But Moby-Dick failed in its own time, slammed by critics and spurned by readers; Melville's truths were too hard to hear. It would be decades after Melville's death before the power of his work was recognized.

Not surprisingly, Melville's writing after Moby-Dick is often preoccupied with the question of communication. In the novella Billy Budd, Melville's second most famous work, a young man's speech impediment makes it impossible for him to defend his innocence. Benito Cereno also ends with a classic moment of failed communication, as the tormented slave ship captain is utterly unable to convey to his rescuer the vital truth that has destroyed him. "Bartleby the Scrivener" is also the story of failed communication, and of the impossibility of connection between human beings.

"Bartleby the Scrivener" is now one of the most famous short stories of the nineteenth century. In 1852, Melville was asked by Putnam's magazine to contribute a work of short fiction. He began by writing a story about a young wife named Agatha who waits seventeen years for news from her husband, who left to seek work. As Melville conceived the story, the mailbox was an essential symbol: as time passes, the unused mailbox rots and falls apart. Word never comes.

This story, though appealing for its symbolism, proved unworkable as fiction. Melville abandoned it, although the forlorn mailbox and the absent mail reworked themselves into the Dead Letter Office at "Bartleby"'s haunting ending. "Bartleby the Scrivener" was published in 1853, to not much fanfare. As with all of Melville's good work, complexity alienated his readers.

In many ways, "Bartleby" is the one of the first stories of corporate discontent. Melville was a child of New York City, and the story unfolds on Wall Street. The scriveners are part of the machinery of modern industry and commerce; they are educated men who do tedious work. "Part of the machinery" seems an apt description of their work: later the services they performed were done by machines. In this world, where a man does his work, earns his pay, and goes on and on until he dies, Bartleby is a freak and an outcast. He is a profoundly depressed and lonely man, who seems completely unable to find work that will satisfy him. Life itself is weary to him. He cannot find a place in the world, and so he dies.

His employer, an elderly lawyer who goes unnamed, tries but fails to connect with Bartleby. Somehow, he is able to empathize with the strange scrivener, but help him he cannot (or will not). At the end of the tale, one of the questions of the story concerns their relationship: did the narrator fail Bartleby? If he did, was the failure avoidable? How responsible is one man for the salvation of another? Even more disturbing, one wonders if Bartleby is not the only one who is doomed. The world that plunged him into gloom is seen in a new light, and the narrator and his employees, who have adapted to this world, seem diminished by their numbness to it.

Major Themes

The world of work and business
"Bartleby the Scrivener" is one of the first great stories of corporate discontent. The description of the office is incredibly bleak, and the landscape of Wall Street is completely unnatural. The work environment is sterile and cheerless. Yet most adapt to it, with varying degrees of success. Though the narrator is a successful man, he is a victim, in some ways, of progress. He has lost the post he occupied during the central events of the story, as the position was deemed redundant and eliminated. We learn later that Bartleby may have lost a job due to similar bureaucratic change. The modern economy includes constant and unfeeling change, which comes at a cost.

Melville often describes the world through concise and telling descriptions of the environment. The character of the world of work and business is most often evoked through physical description of the landscape. In the final prison scene Melville's description of environment extends the scope of the story from the business world to the general human condition. Bartleby cannot pretend to have enthusiasm for this bleak world, and so he disengages from it, in stages, until he dies.

Doubling
Doubles make for an important thematic device. Through doubles, Melville suggests our connection to other human beings. Nippers and Turkey are like two faces of a coin, as are, finally, Bartleby and the narrator. With Bartleby, Melville is constantly evoking him as a kind of phantom double. The descriptions of him frequently cast him as either a ghost or a corpse. At the end of the story, Bartleby's significance expands, and he becomes not only a double for the narrator but also a kind of double for all of humanity.

Responsibility and Compassion
How responsible is the narrator for Bartleby's salvation? Our narrator fails the scrivener, who clearly needs help, but Melville in no way demonizes his narrator. In fact, the narrator seems to go to greater lengths than most people would in his efforts to help Bartleby. But it seems far short of what is necessary, and indisputably the narrator stops short of his limits. Should there be limits to our will to help a man, if his life is at stake? Is writing off a suffering man by saying he's responsible for himself only a way to excuse our own lack of compassion?

Isolation and the failure to connect
Bartleby is one of the most isolated characters in all of literature. Bartleby's environment cuts him off from nature and often, from other men. By day, Bartleby's window stares at a wall. Wall Street is a bleak and unnatural landscape, and Bartleby also stays there at night, when the bustling human population vanishes and the streets become desolately empty. The narrator makes attempts to learn about Bartleby and help him, but all attempts meet with failure, and the narrator gives up.

Mortality
Mortality plays a role in "Bartleby," but not in the usual sense. Death pervades the story, not as the event in time that finishes a life, but as a kind of poison permeating every aspect of the world we live in. The act of living is the real death. Living is a tiring and arduous process, full of numbing compromises and submission to meaningless tasks. Our mortality is unavoidable, and our best intentions are often futile. The final image of the story is the Dead Letter Office, where the last undelivered communications to the dead are burned without ever having been read.


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