![]() ![]() The narrator seriously claims to seek an active solution. As the story's conflict heightens, Bartleby grows increasingly passive. As he tells the story, his mood ranges from patient to angry to Christian to vengeful and finally to compassionate, while Bartleby is expressionless throughout. The narrator's passivity mirrors Bartleby's, although the narrator remains unaware of any parallel between himself and his clerk. The narrator soon blithely rationalizes his disobedience and then abdicates the limited responsibility for Bartleby he had assumed, letting his ex-landlord charge Bartleby with vagrancy. Melville, a lifelong rebel against his strict Dutch Reformed up-bringing, juxtaposes biblical ethics with those of contemporary Wall Street, most scathingly by quoting Jesus from John 3:34: "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye shall love one another." Though briefly inspired by the command to treat Bartleby kindly, the narrator quickly reverts to ignoring it, behaving as if the absolute command were limited to occasions when such love is convenient or when the recipient is suitably grateful. References to Egypt, Petra, and Carthage aside, much of "Bartleby" is rooted in the ancient world, particularly in the Bible. The narrator later finds him in "The Tombs"-the city jail-staring at "a high wall." The architecture of the Tombs is distinctly Egyptian looking, with formidable walls and pillars. ( Petra, the Greek word for "rock," draws a further analogy between Wall Street and Petra as two lifeless sealed tombs.) In his dismal abode Bartleby stays, even after the narrator fires him. and covered by sand until archeologists unearthed it in 1812. Wall Street is compared to Petra, a Middle Eastern city desolated in the ninth century A.D. "For long periods," the narrator relates, "he would stand looking out … upon the dead brick wall" he would be "behind his screen … in one of those dead wall reveries of his," around the clock, seven days a week. Having stopped work, Bartleby continues living at his desk, eating little, responding "I would prefer not to" to his employer's and fellow workers' requests. ![]() The lawyer-narrator, whose office is divided in two by "ground-glass folding doors," has even "procured a high green folding screen which might entirely isolate Bartleby from sight." Within three feet of the panes was a wall," further enclosing Bartleby. In the office itself Bartleby is seated near a small window, "which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks but which owing to some subsequent erections commanded at present no view at all. Its two windows look out on a white wall and "a lofty brick wall, black by age," located within ten feet of the office workers. As Leo Marx's 1953 essay "Melville's Parable of the Walls" points out, Bartleby works in a stultifying office: from Wall Street Dead ends, blank walls, or dead walls reinforce this image of hopelessness. Walls of many kinds recur in the story, making Bartleby seem like a laboratory subject trapped in a maze with no exit. Wall Street is also an important verbal symbol. Although Bartleby works for a Wall Street lawyer, not a stockbroker, his placement in the nation's financial center has obvious economic implications. The subtitle, "A Story of Wall Street," drives home this point. When Bartleby stops, is he still the scrivener? Can he be? Does he, and do we, acquire identities only through work? Or do people have inherent value whether or not they produce labor? The analogy between Bartleby and all of humankind becomes explicit in Melville's final two sentences: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" The concerned tone of this last line, and of the story, belongs to a narrator who, like his money-driven society, ironically drains Bartleby's life of energy even while mouthing pious personal concern for him. At the beginning of the story, the title character is a scrivener, or law copyist, the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of a human photocopying machine. Though this short work is best known simply as "Bartleby," its full title-"Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street"-is significant. He poses the question: "Why would someone prefer the independence of homelessness to the meager security that society offers the homeless?" By asking and not answering this question, he offers a puzzling story unusually open to interpretation. In the 1853 story "Bartleby," Herman Melville anticipates the alienation theme so common in the works of contemporary American writers. BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER: A STORY OF WALLSTREET ![]()
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