October 25, 2021
Some Thoughts on “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Bartleby makes sense to me. While I have been aware of Melville’s 1853 short story for a long time, I have never had the occasion to read it. I remedied that this semester by assigning it to my Template:1102 class. They had trouble with Poe, so I think they’re going to hate this one, but we’ll see. In their defense, I’m not sure that “Bartleby” would have resonated with me when I was their age—I might have been equally confused about this weird dude. Yet, now I’m a bit more cognizant of the existential crises that chasing the American Dream has on individuals and our collective psyche as a country. The pandemic has made more of us aware that life is more than punching a time clock.
Yes, in many respects, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is more about the narrator than it is about Bartleby. In many respects, he’s the real tragic figure of this story because he never really gets it. He is a sympathetic character who honestly does his best to help Bartleby, but ironically, his solutions offer little succor to the ailing man. He is a good boss, but even his generosity does not mitigate the effects of a larger issue: the fact that the modern world has dehumanized its workers, making them little more than ghostly husks that repeat the same tasks daily for years on end in the name of what? Progress? Modernity? Business? The narrator is never named, suggesting he is more a functionary than he is a person, but he does have a title: the Master of Chancery in the State of New York—whatever the hell that is. It sounds impressive, but is likely a bullshit job, that the narrator says “was not a very arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative.”[1] That is: not hard, but pays well.
. . .
notes
- ↑ Melville, Herman (2002). "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In Sipiora, Phillip. Reading and Writing about Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 211.
