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Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (The Art of the Novella series)

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Herman Melville wrote this story in 1853, two years after Moby Dick had been published and his writing career was beginning to lose its luster. Subtitled, "A Story of Wall Street", it is a seemingly simple story about a lawyer who hires a gentleman named Bartleby as a scrivener in his office. This was way back in the days before photocopy machines and scriveners performed the necessary tasks of tediously hand copying documents over and over. Bartleby was good at the copying part of his job, but when asked to proofread aloud one day he simply replied, "I prefer not to." From that moment forward, he used the phrase "I prefer not to" for every task requested of him, eventually "preferring not to" do any work whatsoever. The lawyer, who is astounded by Bartleby's attitude, tells the story in the first person.

The story is rich in language and yet spare in actual action. The reader is forced to think, and think seriously about the choices we make daily. Bartleby chose to rebel and become an anti-hero. But the real protagonist of the story is the lawyer, who is drawn into Bartleby's power and grows to admire him. The conclusion is sad, but inevitable. Recommended.

The story of Bartleby is simply about a man loosing his will to live. It is intended to show the reader a dark side in all of us when the meaning of our existence is allowed to be challenged. The chilling image of Bartleby in his previous job at the Dead Letter Office leaves my imagination running wild, wondering about the contents of the letters and how Bartleby must have gone from concern to sadness to indifference about his own mortality as he read the messages written to those who can no longer receive them. I'm glad Melville left Bartleby's reason for being (or not being) a mystery. This way, any reader can relate to the story by drawing on their own experience.

"Bartleby" is strictly speaking just a magazine sketch, one of a batch of informal sketches from magazines reprinted together as The Piazza Tales. It has the format of a memoir of an eccentric character, Bartleby, as told by a nameless first-person narrator, "an eminently safe man" by his own account, a lawyer who earns his living through the most mundane, routine legal paperwork, who also complains that 'reformers' have deprived him of his lucrative sinecure in state government. "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has ben filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best," he says of himself. In short, in this "Story of Wall Street", he is a drone, a financial parasite, and he would have been recognized as such by Melville's readership in the 1850s, a era when Wall Street was regarded with as much suspicious as in 2009. He is also a smug, sanctimonious, cautious man, irritably comfortable to exploit the labor of his copyists, one of whom is an impaired alcoholic and the other perhaps a pre-medication psychotic. When the third impaired eccentric, Bartleby, joins the staff, our Narrator is readily 'generous' in tolerating him as long as he can make a dime. It seems to me fairly obvious that we readers are supposed to treat the Narrator with distrust, perhaps even dislike.

Melville wrote at the beginning of the now-established literary tradition of the 'unreliable narrator', supplanting the omniscient narrator of the majority of 19th C novels. But Melville transcends that tradition in his first effort, giving us a 'clueless' narrator, an observer who is honest only in his acknowledgement of his complete non-understanding of his subject. To accept the Narrator's analysis of Bartleby would be a fatal error of readerly judgement. Whatever Melville's subtext in this story -- whatever Melville wants to tell us -- that Narrator is the one person who can't possibly be expected to comprehend it.

Melville also wrote at the end of the ancient tradition of 'allegory.' His only literary peer and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was the grand master of slyly allegorical short tales, and it makes sense to examine Bartleby as a specimen of the allegorical genre. Thus we need to ask who the Narrator figures for, and who the Scrivener, and then what it is, really, that Bartleby "prefers" not to participate in. My interpretation is that N represents the entire commercial/financial culture of 19th C America, while Bartleby embodies all those who are aliens within that system, first by necessity and then by bitter choice. Bartleby, in effect, prefers not to be a link in that chain, a cog in that machine.

Another school of literary criticism would examine Melville's personal life for clues of his authorial intentions. It's widely known that Melville was finding his inability to "make a decent living and support his family" both frustrating and frightening during the decade after the commercial failure of Moby Dick. In fact, Melville found himself on the verge of becoming a patronage drone, a place-holder in the New York Customs Office. It may be important to realize that Melville's father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, was both an extremely powerful man in America at the time, and a man of energetic personal forcefulness. It's hard to believe that Melville was not intimidated and oppressed by Shaw, yet no more able to make a case for himself than poor Bartleby.

I'm just tossing off suggestions here, my friends. Bartleby is an enigma wrapped in complexity, and no final interpretation would stand up to a second reading. When I first read it, in the 1960s, it was still neglected and overshadowed among Melville's works by "Billy Budd". It's been interesting to watch the emergence of recognition among readers that Bartleby is one of the greatest short masterpieces of the English language.

One thing more to say about Bartleby is that it's marvelously funny. It's Herman Melville's best assimiliation of the ludricrous style of Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers. The first dozen pages, before the appearance of Bartleby, are devoted to comedy in the form of exaggerated portrayals of the three hapless employees of the nameless narrator. Each of these comic-relief figures will be brought back into service at intervals in the subsequent tale. It's supremely important, dear reader, to recognize Melville's sardonic humor; other reviewers who rated Bartleby at two stars or less clearly "didn't get the joke."

I'm not very big into fiction; in fact, I dislike most of it. But, Bartleby the Scrivener is one of those rare works I actually enjoy to read and reread. There are many theories on what this short narrative is "about" ... from Bartleby being a representation of the pokings of the socially-numbed narrator's "Higher Self" to a portrait of the four humor personality types (Bartleby being the melancholic). Whatever it is, I know I can relate to it. Anyone who has ever felt unhappy, trapped, confined in a drudge of a job yet deeply in touch with themselves, their spirit and passions, or unwittingly conscious of "the game" (i.e., most of your idealists) will probably swoon at this well-written tale of an imprisoned free-spirit.

Most people have missed the main point of Herman Melville's Bartleby. This is not a story about a man sinking into unfathomable darkness or a dark comedy about an estranged worker. Bartleby is a historical work set in context with the market revolution. The story's setting of New York in the 19th century reflects the central location of this boom that changed the life of the worker forever. Bartleby is simply a man facing the new workplace existence that came with this time period. While most other workers adapted to the many changes they were forced to endure, Bartleby decided to say no to the ideas trying to assimilate him. The story of Barleby shows how the human soul can be unwilling to adapt and can be destroyed by change.

Bartleby is the story of one of the great ' naysayers' of Literature. But unlike Dostoevsky's ' Underground Man' he does not scream out his 'nay' in curses. His 'nay 'is quiet. " I prefer not to" . A much more romantic American adolescent naysayer Holden Caulfield will captivate readers also by saying to society, the world, the system of conventions that all are subject to, nay and nay again.
The outcast, the loner, the naysayer is of course one great archetypal figure of world and most especially American Literature.
Bartleby belongs among them.
And the fact that neither he nor the narrator nor the author fully articulate the ' root of his nay' adds in a way to the mystery and mystique of the character.
There is it seems to many of us something admirable in those who can turn away from the demands of ordinary society, and listen to the sound of their own drummer.
But what is maddening and absurd in Bartleby is that he does not seem to do this for anything special. He gives no hint that this ' nay ' gives him personal satisfaction. His withdrawal seems impersonal .And it seems a reflection of his own feeling about himself which is ' nay' Or on another interpretation it might be said that his saying ' I prefer not to' is the only way in which he preserves a vestige in his own identity.
Clearly there are many ways of reading this. But this is an exemplary tale, of course enriched by Melville's descriptions of the office world of the time, by his masterful language and humor.
One of the great long - short stories, or if you will, short novels. A masterwork without question.

Realizing that this is a review and not a forum for debate, I can't resist pointing out that Melville and Thoreau were contemporaries. I also must say that this superb but enigmatic story appears more to be inspired by Thoreau than the reverse. One English prof of many years ago, pointed out the encompassing imagery of surrounding walls. More obviously is Bartleby's efforts to live-out Thoreau's philosophies (WALDEN and CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE) in the dense, urban forest of Wall Street.

How successful is Bartleby? I think that we can see some of Melville's opinions of urban life showing through. In many ways, the forest and the sea can be far kinder environs.

There are two sorts of people: hierarchical automatons who follow, and egalitarian free-thinkers who lead. The problem is, since the advent of civilization, opportunities for the former have grown exponentially at the expense of the latter -- particularly after the industrial revolution. Bartleby's innate nature can be suppressed, but it cannot be extinguished. When it smolders back to life, his dogged preference not to re-engage in this inhuman world of drudgery is unfortunately reasonable. He furthermore sees no need to explain himself to anyone because they're all uncomprehending automatons, even the lawyer until perhaps the end.

Melville presents us with a deep enigma: what are we egalitarian thinkers to do with this increasingly centralized, autocratic world? Obviously, the answer is not in Bartleby. Thoreau's civil disobedience exhortation has a fatal flaw: it only works reliably if the majority participates. A lone protester can starve himself to death in prison without affecting any positive change at all.

Perhaps at the very least, Bartleby is a cautionary tale. Avoid the road of thoughtless drudgery if it disagrees with your constitution. Tolerate it too long, and it may engulf you in a paralyzing melancholy.

"Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair." ~T.S. Eliot

I found Moby Dick to be pretty dry for the most part (gasp!) so I have been hesitant to read another Melville book. This book was so short, I thought I would give him another chance. I found this book to be a lot more entertaining and thought provoking.

I thought the first half of the book was really funny. A lawyer works in an office with a crew of quirky people. He employs two scriveners (Turkey and Nippers) and an office boy (Ginger Nut). Turkey is a reckless drunk in the afternoon and Nippers suffers from indigestion and is irritable in the morning. As the narrator says, "Their fits relieved each other like guards." Their quirkiness drives the lawyer crazy; however, their positive attributes compensate for their quirks and the lawyer is able to overlook them.

The lawyer later hires Bartleby as a scrivener who is calm and sedate and who he hopes will help calm down the other two scriveners. One day the lawyer asks Bartleby to help him proofread a copied document and Bartleby responds, "I'd rather not." The lawyer is just flabbergasted and doesn't know how to respond. He decides to let it go but discovers that Bartleby has the gall to respond the same way every time the lawyer asks him to do even the smallest tasks (even putting his finger on tape so he can tie a bow). I love how Melville says "Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance." So true.

Later, Bartleby decides he doesn't want to work at all so he just sits there. The second half of the book, the lawyer is trying to figure out a way to get Bartleby to work and finally find a way to rid himself of him. Bartleby holds a strange trance on him and he feels sorry for him so he doesn't know what to do. This lawyer is a better man than I.

The primary theme throughout the book is despair and hopelessness. Bartleby has just given up on life and on any efforts in trying to find meaning and purpose. The despair builds until he just won't do anything. "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

I would prefer not to.
This sentence deserves to be as well known as the opener of Moby Dick, but it seems to me it is not. At least it was new to me, which may be entirely my own fault.
I am reading Melville's writing in the sequence of Volume 3 of the LoA edition. 'Bartleby' was initially published separately in a magazine, then later collected with the Piazza Tales in book form. It was written in a down phase of HM's writing career. 'Israel Potter' was a lackluster production, and the previous 'Pierre' a grandiose failure.

And here the man came back with roaring guns in small format. If he had written nothing else, this story would make him great. I see him as a predecessor of 20th century giants like Kafka or R.Walser.
The story is deeply pessimistic. The narrator is a Wall Street lawyer (at that time, it seems, that was an honorable profession), who tells us of his problems with his employees. Xerox was not yet well known, so copies of legal texts had to be written by hand and then checked for accuracy. Bartleby is one of the copy-writers. He is a good one, but otherwise an oddball. Nothing is known about him except he worked in the dead letter office in Washington previously. How ominous. He writes well, but is otherwise a totally anti-social being, who will never share social activities, nor talk about himself, nor even participate in the joint task of comparing texts. 'I would prefer not to'.
His attitude amounts to insubordination, the narrator's patience is tested to the ridiculous extreme of moving office because Bartleby will not accept his dismissal. He prefers not to leave the current office, where he actually lives, as the narrator finds out when he goes to the office on a Sunday. (Believe it or not, that is an experience that I share with the narrator, ie finding somebody living, literally, in the office.)
But do not expect for a minute that the writing is downcast. It is the light-handed approach to telling a somber tale which makes this text so charming. Melville did not make the mistake of explaining his meaning. The narrator tells his story with an attitude of puzzlement and of poking fun at himself for having been so lenient with this creature, and of a bad conscience for having finally failed him.
This is really one of the best short stories of all times.