Analysis of Bartleby, the scrivener Essay

The fibbers initial self-characterization is important to the story. He is a sound gentleman, wizard who takes few risks and tries above all to conform. The most pragmatic concerns of financial security and ease of life argon his priorities. He has made himself perfectly at home in the modern economy he works as a lawyer dealing with rich handss legal documents. He is at that placefore an opposite or complement to Bartleby in many ways.He is also ill conform to to be entrusted with the salvation of a nonher. Bartleby the Scrivener is one of the first great stories of corporate discontent. The emptiness of modern business organization life is an important theme. The translation of the piece is incredibly bleak on one side, the windows open onto a light shaft, and on the other, the windows look out onto a brick wall. The landscape of fence Street is completely unnatural, and one is cut off from nature and almost all living things. At night, this isolation also includes the absence seizure of people.The work environment is sterile and cheerless. Yet most adapt to it, with varying degrees of success. though the fibber is a successful man, he is a victim, in just astir(predicate) ways, of progress. He has doomed the post he occupied during the central events of the story, as the position was deemed redundant and eliminated. The modern economy includes constant and unfeeling change, which comes at a cost. Doubling is a recurring theme in Bartleby. Bartleby is a phantom double of our cashier, and the parallels between them leave be further explored later.Nippers and jokester argon doubles of each(prenominal) other. Nippers is useless in the morning and amentiferous in the afternoon, while Turkey is drunk in the afternoon and productive in the morning. Nippers ambition mirrors Turkeys resignation to his place and the sad uneventfulness of his c beer, the difference coming about because of their several(prenominal) boards. Nippers cherishes ambit ions of being more than than than a mere scrivener, while the elderly Turkey must plead with the narrator to consider his age when evaluating his productivity.Their vices are also parallel, in terms of being appropriate vices for each mans respective age. Alcoholism is a vice that develops with time. Ambition arguably is most volatile in a mans youth. These two characters are obviously non fleshed out they are caricatures of different personalities found in the business world, and their silliness is stretched beyond the point of believable realism. They provide valuable comic relief in what is otherwise a somber and upsettingtale.From the beginning, the description of Bartleby is striking. He is a person who take cares already dead(p) he is depict alternately as one would describe a corpse or as one would describe a ghost. Pale from indoors work, motionless, without any expression or shew of humanity passion in him at all, he is a man already beaten.Even his famous narrat ive of non-compliance, I would prefer not to, is an act of exhaustion rather than active defiance. His success at acquire away with his uncooperativeness comes from his very passivity, which seems to cast a spell everyplace the narrator. It is not I leave not entirely I would prefer not, emphasizing that Bartleby is acting out of emotional response rather than rough philosophical or ethical choice. Bartleby will detach from the world in stages, beginning with this first statement.With each time he reiterates the statement, he is renouncing one more piece of the world and its duties. The final renunciation will be of living itself, characteristically arrived at indirectly by the preference not to eat. The scenes in which the narrator asks the advice of his employees are endlessly comical in tone. Each man reacts according to the dictates of the time of sidereal day if it is morning, Nippers is impetuous and Turkey benign, and if it is afternoon, Turkey is belligerent and Nipp ers calm. Their predictable reactions underscore their status as symbols or types rather than graphic characters. They also serve as the clowns of the story.Bartleby and the narrator are more real, provided both of them also obligate powerful allegorical roles. Note that these two share an contribution room, just as Nippers and Turkey do. Increasingly, Bartleby is described in unearthly terms, and a perceptive reader will soon realize that the ghost is in some ways the narrators phantom double. Note how often we see Bartleby as phantom, as when the narrator roars his name until he appears Like a very ghost, agreeably to the the laws of magical invocation, at the trinity summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage (19). Later, we learn that Bartleby haunts the build. Like a ghost, he lives in the office when no one else is there, when rampart Street is a desert, a landscape both completely unnatural and forlornly empty.The narrator senses that there are parallels bet ween himself and the scrivener, and Bartlebys gloom infects him Before, I had never experienced nought but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now draw me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam (23). Bartlebysplight draws the narrator into depths of feeling that he did not know he was capable of. Part of Bartlebys power over the narrator is that he somehow sees Bartleby as a actuate of himself. He, too, has been forced to adapt to the business world. that while he has adapted and gone by dint of the consequent numbing (previous unable to feel more than a not unpleasing sadness), Bartleby has been bludgeoned to exhaustion.Nothing pleases him about this world. The narrator, at different times, wants to wait on Bartleby. alone we have been warned that the narrator is a safe man who thinks the easiest path is also the best. His pity for Bartleby turns to revulsion (see the qualifying from pp. 24-25, above). The narrators plight works through the themes of responsibility and compassion. His obligations, in one sense, are nothing. however as far as Bartleby is a living, suffering being, and that both men are sons of Adam, the narrator arguably should do all that he stack.To what extent is the narrator supposed to do the melancholic scrivener? Has he failed as a human being if he has done any less than all he can? After asserting that after a certain point, pity becomes revulsion, he defends the transformation They swerve who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain despair of remedying excessive and organic ill (24-25). Yet the narrator goes on to describe the transformation as defensive.Although he denies the charge that the pity-to-revulsion change is due to selfishness, his explanation of the motives behind it seem like littler more than a selfishness that is philosophically justified. At work here i s what Toni Morrison (an admirer of Melville) would call a shortage of love. Ironically, on the day his pity turns to revulsion, the narrator was on his way to Church.The narrator never does make it to Church that day, and the symbolism is obvious. Though he was on his way to see a celebrity preacher, religions highest ideals do not win a place in the narrators heart Melville, as he does in many of his works, is taking a small jab at religion and its inability to change men meaningfully for the better. The narrator will try to help Bartleby return home, but we will see that there are limits to what he feels he can do.The office pose of the modern business world undergoes some interesting conceptualizations in this section. At first, the narrator calls our attention to the desolateness of the office and of Wall Street Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra and every night ofevery day it is an emptiness (23). There are parallels between Bartlebys experience of the workplace at night and his experience of the workplace in world(a) share a similarity he sees something that no one else sees. The desolation of Wall Street is part of Bartlebys essential perception of it. The literal desolation at night is paralleled by the spiritual desolation during the day. Bartleby sees both, and through him the narrator gets some sense of them.The narrator also makes an interesting move by describing the office as a site of savagery. He cites the example of a recent Wall Street murder, and explains why an office can be conducive to otherwise unthinkable acts Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation interpreted place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have modify as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations . . . (33-34). The office, a site of modern economic systems and progress, becomes a space like the jungle island in The Lord of the Flies. Something about the space is dehumanizing, and makes murder possible.Finally, the narrators dismantle to help Bartleby weakens, and its because of his work. Apparently, the modern office also makes possible the neglect of another human being. The narrator is certainly not an exception among humans for his choices he puts up with more from Bartleby than anyone else does. unless in the end, he makes choices that amount to abandonment of Bartleby.If his action is something any human would do, then the abandonment of Bartleby is a comment on humanity. The ghostly descriptions of Bartleby are now extended to the narrator. He describes going up the stairs to his old office as going upstairs to my old haunt (42). The language is part of the expansion of Bartlebys ghostly characteristics to the narrator and later, to all of humanity.We see that Bartleby does not want to do anything living itself tires him. In this way, Bartleby the S crivener is more than just a didactic tract on the economic world of Melvilles day. The conditions of life are not easily changed, and the depictions of office sterility and isolation in a large, unnatural world seem equally applicable today. Bartleby is a creature unable to adapt to this world, because he is too honest about what appeals to him. Nothing in life excites him. When the narrator tries to suggest different occupations to Bartleby, the scriveners response is always the same I would prefernot to.The narrators offer to have Bartleby stay at his own home seems initially generous, but this belated offer of hospitality comes from a fear of indignation a lawyer has threatened to publish the case in the papers. Yet one of the accomplishments of the story is that our narrator is basically a decent man. His abandonment of Bartleby is in no way exceptional, nor are we meant to see the narrator as more cruel or uncaring than the rest of humanity. If he fails Bartleby, we also must deliver that most of us would fail him as well. Several times in the story, we are made to query Bartlebys sanity. Ginger Nut gleefully suggests that Bartleby is insane I think, sir, hes a little loony (16). The narrator also apparently shares the opinion, as he confides to the grub-man that Bartleby is a little deranged (44).But Bartleby, whatever his problems may be, is fully aware of the world around him. When the narrator greets Bartleby in prison, hes condescending to him, speaking to him in the way that one condescends to the mad And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass. Bartlebys reply is concise and crisp I know where I am (43). He is aware of the world. Notice also that there is a double meaning in the exchange. Both Bartleby and the narrator could be referring to the world itself. Bartleby is asserting that he can see the world around him clearly, and he apparently finds nothing to excite him. Environment has b een important so far to the story, and Melvilles concise and powerful description of the prison yard continues the trend. Death pick upry is abundant.The description comes not during the first visit, but right before the narrator finds Bartlebys destruction. He describes the character of the masonry as Egyptian, and mentions the soft imprisoned turf growing underfoot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung (45). For people of Melvilles day, even more so than now, Egyptian character would recall death, as the Egyptian civilization was known mostly through its funerary objects and elaborate burial practices. Incidentally, the Halls of Justice are called The Tombs.The image of the turf is ambiguous. Is it an image of hope, or of imprisonment? The heart of the eternal pyramids is a pretty phrase, but the pyramids, it must be remembered, were tombs. Death itself is the only constant. The image of birds dropping seeds, which grow in spite of the antagonistic environment, islyrical and powerful. But is the grass a metaphor for hope, and lifes persistence, the possibility of survival and bang in a harsh environment? Or does the phrase imprisoned turf dominate the image? The grass then becomes battered, trapped life, with no hope of escaping the Egyptian character of the Tombs.Mortality is not a theme here in the usual sense. Bartleby chooses his death, detaching from life in stages and sliding towards an inevitable end. The real death is more than an event in time death is diffuse, a spiritual gloom pervading the empty Wall Street landscape, the imposing stonework of the prison, and the Dead Letter Office where Bartleby supposedly worked. Living is not the opposite of death, but a condition continually assaulted and permeated by it.The final rumor is haunting and dark. We learn also that Bartleby befogged the Dead Letter Office job due to an administration change. The doubling continues remember that the narrator lost his position due to bureaucratic change as well. Here, the doubling is expanded. Bartleby is a phantom double not only for the narrator, but for all of humanity. The Dead Letter Office is a place of supreme gloom, where evidence of human mortality and the futility of our best intentions would have been unavoidable. The narrator, a man who adapts to this life, who thrives in the world that exhausted Bartleby, cannot help but be moved by Bartlebys vision.The tone of his final statement (Ah, Bartleby Ah, humanity) is of a sadness mixed with resignation, a pained sigh rather than a shriek of anger. He has failed to help even one man. He can do nothing to alter the human condition.