Batleby the Scrivener

"Bartleby the Scrivener" is a complex story, so I am going to zero in on one particularly interesting and intelligent aspect of it. Due to the power of the message even this one particular aspect will be complex, of course. The first thing to note is that the story has a first-person narrator. The narrator, an anonymous lawyer, is in fact a major character in his own right. Ostensibly the story is about Bartleby and his actions as a scrivener. However, what the story is really about, in a sense, is the effect Bartleby seems to have on the narrator. We learn a great deal about the narrator, but more importantly, we see him undergo several rather significant changes. These changes bring to light Melville's comment on the oppression and lack of compassion in the emerging capitalist economy

The narrator's initial self-characterization is important to the story. He is a "safe" man, one who takes few risks and tries above all to conform to societies norms (Melville 1109). The most pragmatic concerns of financial security and ease of life are his priorities. He has made himself perfectly at home in the modern economy: he works as a lawyer dealing with rich men's legal documents. He is therefore a complement or a double to Bartleby in many ways.

Doubling is a recurring theme in "Bartleby the Scrivener." Bartleby is a phantom double of our narrator, and the parallels between them will be explored later. Nippers and Turkey are doubles of each other. Nippers is useless in the morning and productive in the afternoon, while Turkey is drunk in the afternoon and productive in the morning. Nippers' ambition mirrors Turkey's resignation to his place and his sad, uneventful career, the difference coming about because of their respective ages. Nippers cherishes ambitions of being more than a mere scrivener, while the elderly Turkey must plead with the narrator to consider his age when evaluating his productivity. Their vices are also parallel, in terms of being appropriate vices for each man's respective age. Alcoholism is a vice that develops with time. Ambition arguably is most volatile in a man's youth. These characters provide valuable comic relief in what is otherwise a somber and upsetting tale. Melville's purpose in making Bartleby's personality act complimentary to the narrator's is to demonstrate the change in the narrator and therefore make his message accessible.

Increasingly, Bartleby is described in ghostly terms, and a perceptive reader will soon realize that the ghost is in some ways the narrator's double. "Yet, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor's hall all by himself" (1120). Presumably the lawyer is also a bachelor. They may have more in common than immediately appears to be. Both are probably well acquainted with loneliness. This sense of loneliness and the ways in which Bartleby has been described in phantom terms are now connecting the two characters. Note how often we see Bartleby as phantom, as when the narrator roars his name until he appears. "Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage" (1118). Later, we learn that Bartleby haunts the building. Like a ghost, he lives in the office when no one else is there, when Wall Street is a desert. A landscape both completely unnatural and forlornly empty (1120). Once again connecting the characters through loneliness.

The narrator senses that there are parallels between himself and the scrivener, and Bartleby's gloom infects him: "Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam" (1120). Here, the narrator truly connects with Bartleby and so gains a new perspective on himself and the connections between human beings. Bartleby's plight draws the narrator into depths of feeling that he did not know he was capable of. Part of Bartleby's power over the narrator is that the lawyer somehow sees Bartleby as a part of himself. He, too, has been forced to adapt to the business world. But while he has adapted and gone through the consequent numbing (previously unable to feel more than a "not unpleasing sadness"), Bartleby has been bludgeoned to exhaustion. Nothing pleases him about this world. The narrator is changing from this compassionless attitude and wants to help Bartleby. "For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me" (1120). The lawyer is changing, and is having feelings of sadness (about the human condition?) that he never admitted to himself before.

We had been warned that the narrator is a safe man who thinks the easiest path is also the best (1109). His "prudential feeling" gets the better of his and his pity for Bartleby turns to repulsion (1121). The narrator's plight works through the themes of responsibility and compassion. His obligations, in one sense, are nothing. As far as Bartleby is a living, suffering being, and that both men are "sons of Adam," the narrator arguably should do all that he can. The narrator's "common sense" causes him to come to the conclusion "that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder" (1121). He sees Bartleby as hopelessly sick. After asserting that after a certain point, pity becomes revulsion, he defends the transformation: "They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill" (1121). Yet the narrator goes on to describe the transformation as defensive. Although he denies the charge that the pity-to-repulsion change is due to selfishness, his explanation of the motives behind it seem like little more than a selfishness that is philosophically justified. Ironically, on the day his pity turns to repulsion, the narrator was on his way to Church. The narrator never does make it to Church that day, and the symbolism is obvious. "Now, one Sunday morning I happened to go to Trinity Church, to hear a celebrated preacher..." Though he was on his way to see a celebrated preacher, religion's