SAMPLE RESPONSE ON “BARTLEBY”

 

 

Does altruism exist for Melville?  The characters Melville creates in “Bartleby, The Scrivener” suggest that Melville yearns for something he does not see: human compassion in a time where “humanity” itself seems to annoy those who participate in it..  The workplace detailed by Melville’s narrator serves as a kind of factory, wherein both work and worker are systematically maintained.  While the narrator waxes content with his “safe” and “easy” way of life, he becomes entangled in a situation that he cannot ease his way out of.  Each step that he takes to comfortably engage himself with or separate himself from Bartleby moves him farther away from the station that he is accustomed to. This shift from comfortable to confronted seems to award the narrator his first glimpse of Man outside the machine—of men as more than objects or curiosities or material for future anecdotes. What the narrator will do with this opportunity, Melville chooses not to reveal.  However, because the narrator recalls his experiences with Bartleby from memory, a sad light is thrown on the possibilities of positive change.  Is this account of Bartleby a mere “history” to make “good-natured gentlemen” “smile,” and “sentimental souls” “weep”?

 

The narrator’s habit of cleverly reducing his employees to two halves of the perfect worker, distracts him from recognizing his very own other-half: Bartleby.  Bartleby, who “prefers not to” do much of anything, though different from the narrator, helps to highlight the passivity, indeed, laziness with which his boss does everything.  The narrator is a man so possessed by his own mildness, that he not only governs his office and workers with an arrogantly passive hand, he uses that very hand even to reach out in charity.  The “fellow-feeling” that the narrator taps into is sourced by a shallow puddle. His lame attempts at charity suggest a man not interested in selfless acts of kindness, but rather a man run by his desire to be well regarded, comfortable, and “safe” and to ultimately dissociate himself from things that are unpleasant or unfamiliar, or disruptive, be they a smelly coat or a human being.  The narrator is so accustomed to being in this decrepit machine rigged together by half-men, that rather than upset the mechanics of it by truly confronting anything, he chooses to leave it, and its scary new parts behind.