Melville\'s Bartleby the Scrivener

Bartleby

The Finite and Infinite: An Analysis of Melville's "Bartleby"

Herman Melville's Bartleby is a representational figure of modern malaise. A soul adrift in the universal modern ethos of self-assertion, Bartleby epitomizes the utter emptiness at the heart of it all: for him the American Dream is one he would "prefer not to" chase. Bartleby's dream, rather, is an unspoken nightmare that ultimately paralyzes him. Whether his paralysis is due to a philosophical or metaphysical paradox that he is unable to overcome is a secret that goes with him to the grave. What the narrator of "Bartleby" intimates, however, is that the Scrivener was more than a mere clerk who passed through the office one day -- and then refused to leave: Bartleby is Everyman -- a lost soul seeking some comfort, some corner to call his own -- some form of charity that asks for nothing in return. This paper will analyze Melville's "Bartleby" and show how the world that Bartleby sees is one that only pretends to know where it is going and what it is doing but in reality is as meaningless and empty as the money-making business on Wall Street, which cares for nothing but the finite -- and for the infinite has not a moment to spare.

Bartleby's predicament -- and ours (and all humanity's as the narrator laments at the end of the tale) -- begins similarly to Bartleby's with his release from the "Dead Letter" office. Emancipation from this work is a double-edged sword, referenced again at the end of the tale, when the narrator speaks again of these letters -- letters of hope speeding to their dusty death… The symbol is clear: we are all born to die -- but as the West was once Christian, it believed in the Resurrection. That faith (and the understanding that went with it) was separated from the reality (the doctrine concerning the Resurrection) with the advent of the modern world: the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment. These two eras conspired to leave modern man like Hamlet -- convinced of certain truths, yet perpetually in doubt of them -- emancipated from the past, yet adrift without it. To survive, modern man merely goes about his business -- thinking only of this: survival. Of the Resurrection, he has lost all thought -- for he has lost the faith of the medieval world, which was the "age of faith." Bartleby is a walking reminder of the consequences of that loss: he refuses to go after the finite. Bartleby's problem is that he has no reason to live, for he is, like Everyman, just short of the infinite, of which charity is the only sign.

So while the narrator hustles and bustles and busies himself over legal texts that shall speed their own way to a dusty death, just as modern day Wall Street has shown us (nothing gold can stay), Bartleby "prefers not to" run in the rat race. Justice, in Bartleby's world, has been maligned: modern philosophy fails to do conscience, morality, and mortality justice -- for modern philosophy is based on liberty. Yet, as Bartleby shows, liberty is a false assumption: Bartleby does as he pleases and still cannot escape prison or death: emancipation from death is impossible -- without, as the West once believed, the Resurrection. The hope that Bartleby clings to is the hope that was written into the "Dead Letters." But such words of promise are not destined for Bartleby -- for there is none to deliver them on time. If the medieval age saw heaven clearly, the modern has lost the vision and sense of effort that one must effect to gain it: the narrator appears to glean a sense of this at the end of the tale: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" is all he can muster. But it expresses the plight well enough: ours is an age that has not received the "good news," as Walker Percy described. We are all sufferers of modern malaise.