Melville's artistic dilemma in Bartleby the Scrivener

Melville

Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" describes the drudgery of daily life in an office. The reader learns about the title scrivener from a well-meaning, good-natured lawyer who hires Bartleby to help in the office alongside his relatively ineffective scribes Nippers and Turkey. At first, Bartleby seems a good fit in spite of his dour demeanor. As time passes, Bartleby loses all motivation to work. He starts to refuse to work completely, as he sinks deeper and deeper into a depression. The narrator reaches out to Bartleby but only in superficial ways, never managing to penetrate the real underlying reasons for Bartleby's funk. Bartleby's death sparks in the narrator a deep sympathy for the plight of humanity. He calls out for "hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities."

With the story of Bartleby the scrivener, Melville addresses a broad range of issues related to the universal human condition. The story is not autobiographical, although there may be some elements and characters to which Melville personally related. To the title character, Melville can relate to the budding sense of futility in the act of writing. As a scrivener, Bartleby does represent the act of writing by rote rather than from a place of creative power. Melville did not work as a scrivener; yet he did struggle with the various ways of expressing his literary talents. He was a failed poet, and Melville also received very little actual recognition for his written work during his lifetime. Moby Dick, for example, "brought its author neither acclaim nor reward," ("Melville, Herman," n.d.).

It is entirely possible that Bartleby represents Melville's deepest fears. He sees in Bartleby a person who has become so utterly dejected that he loses even the will to stay alive. Bartleby is suicidal, although he lacks the motivation even to kill himself. Instead, he simply stops eating. Without the will to eat, he dies of starvation in the symbolic dead letter room. Melville pursued his writing career with perhaps as much stubbornness as Bartleby exhibited in the story. Bartleby refuses to work, and then refuses even to leave the premises after he is fired. Without deigning to offer any explanation, Bartleby makes outlandish statements like "I would prefer not to make any change at all," which leave no room for dialogue or discussion. The narrator admits he was forced to have Bartleby removed from the premises, and feels understandably guilty when he later discovers that Bartleby has been placed in jail. Bartleby's extreme passivity must have struck a chord with Melville, whose life does not indicate anything remotely akin to Bartleby's mental illness. Melville may have simply been afraid that he would channel his frustration into a depression, rather than to productivity.

Melville succeeded in his personal life, and achieved some literary fame in his lifetime such as getting published in magazines. He could not have believed his life to be as futile as that of Bartleby. Yet the narrator in "Bartleby the Scrivener" wonders "what manner of life he led prior to the present narrator's making his acquaintance." Is Bartleby imagined to be a failed creative writer who, after years of experiencing failure, relents to a meaningless office job? Writing for Bartleby has become a degrading, lifeless position instead of one that empowers and liberates.