Elegy for Bartleby

“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

- From Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

With major literary contributions on notions of individuality and isolation coming from giants like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville himself during the same period in history, it seems a bit odd that Herman Melville’s minor work, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, enjoys the popularity that it does. Still, it remains one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing character studies, introducing to countless readers the inscrutable Bartleby, with his strange, obstinate devotion to his rather uncanny preferences. Yet for all of the title character’s eccentricities, it is perhaps the story’s narrator, the “eminently safe” lawyer, who evokes the most sympathy in his audience as we witness the self-absorbed man grapple with his own conceptions on how to interact with others. Bartleby’s dehumanized, alive-but-dead manner continually challenges the lawyer’s own expectations, forcing him to reshape his views on the inherent value of people until finally he is able to experience a moment of real compassion for his fellow man.

Early in the narration, we can see that the lawyer tends to oversimplify matters, telling us in the second paragraph that he has always believed that “the easiest way of life is the best” (110). He even extends this attitude toward his own employees, referring to them only by nickname as if “Turkey”, “Nippers”, and “Ginger Nut” were adequate summaries of each person’s respective character. He is quick to factor them like equations into what he believes to be their prime characteristics; Turkey, for example, is a steady employee until noon, at which point he becomes reckless and energized, while Nippers is beset by indigestion in the morning, making him irritable and testy until after the noon hour. They are defined mechanically, as predictable as the ticking of clockwork. Throughout the first half of the piece we are liberally reminded of this peculiarly punctual aspect of their personas, yet nothing further about them is ever explored, especially past their utility to the lawyer’s own practice.

Bartleby, by contrast, frustrates every attempt to reduce him into a formula in a way similar to the deduction of his coworkers, though certainly not for lack of trying. Unable to understand why the impenetrable scrivener refuses to do as ordered, the lawyer at one point closely scrutinizes Bartleby’s routine and imagines that his diet consists only of the spicy cakes he sends for known as ginger-nuts. In the line of reasoning that ensues, he exposits, “…what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all” (117). Almost all of the lawyer’s attempts to divine reason or motive from Bartleby’s actions meet a similar dead end. Although his manner and his actions are unswervingly consistent, Bartleby manages to upset the balance of comfortable predictability that the lawyer had previously felt with his original staff.

Though he is incapable of calculating any possible motivation behind Bartleby’s behavior, the lawyer still noticeably dehumanizes him in thought and language. Initially, he represents Bartleby as a “penniless wight” and his “hired clerk” (119) instead of the troubled soul that his actions show him to be. Even when being complimentary during the first days of exposure, he is at best “pallidly neat” (114) and “a valuable acquisition” (119). Bartleby’s worth is measured only in the efficiency of his services. While at first the lawyer does demonstrate a certain basic compassion for him, he justifies his feelings by stating that “he is useful to me…Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval” (118). The use of “purchase” here brings to mind the medieval practice of selling indulgences, as if kindness toward Bartleby naturally traded off with time in purgatory. Compassion is not yet the end in itself for the lawyer, but the means to greater selfish gain.

The first time the lawyer demonstrates genuine compassion for the human side of Bartleby is upon learning that he lives alone in the office. He exclaims to us, “what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible!” (120). Perhaps it is a solitude he can identify with; although it is not explicitly noted, the lawyer’s lack of mention about his domestic life implies much about the his situation outside of work. In any event, such thought have a remarkable effect on him, as he admits, ”for the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me…both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam” (121). It is the first time he identifies with Bartleby on a personal level, and marks the beginning of his maturity into a more sympathetic human being.

The experience colors every future interaction between the two men; even when the lawyer moves his office to escape Bartleby’s presence, he confesses the need to “tear himself” away from the hapless law-copyist (129). The same sentiment compels the lawyer to go above and beyond the rational call of duty, later inducing him to invite Bartleby into his home (131), visit him twice in jail, and attempt to pay for his meals in jail (132-3). He obviously feels a personal obligation to preserve Bartleby’s well-being, even though Bartleby himself appears to have no desire for the same. At Bartleby’s death, the lawyer is reverential, observing that he has gone to rest “with kings and counselors” (134), an allusion to the long-suffering Job. The lawyer comes to identify Bartleby’s end with a tragic, Biblical greatness that would have been unimaginable had the lawyer never known the ill-fated scrivener.

It is arguable that the lawyer’s actions during Bartleby’s final days are not acts shaped by compassion, but responses to a guilty conscience. Such a motivation, however, could be indicative of an even more profound change in character than compassion alone could accomplish. After all, who among us could empathize so completely with a character with motives as mysterious as Bartleby’s that one feels guilty toward him? Whatever the driving force behind the lawyer’s behavior, it is clear that he has reached a higher awareness of the plight of humanity. Listen to him describe the fates of the dead letters that he imagines filled and eventually overwhelmed Bartleby’s past:

“…he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” (134)

These are not the words of the same man narrating from the beginning of the story. Perhaps, then, the message we should take from this is that if the person most set in his or her own ways can be moved to even a slight change by the tragedy of one Bartleby, then maybe all is not lost for us, after all.