Walt Whitman and Herman Melville \"Crossing Brooklyn

Walt Whitman and Herman Melville

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" are set in New York City during the early years of the industrial revolution, but are markedly different in tone, theme and the perceptions and feelings of the main characters. Melville's characters exist without joy, love or hope, and merely drag themselves through a life of drudgery and alienation, without making any human connections to each other or to nature. Mankind in Bartleby's world is simply trapped in a pointless existence that ends with death, and unlike Whitman's narrator they are unable to rise above this grim, mundane world or imagine a common link with others or with the past and the future. Rather than simply being tools and machines carrying out routine, white-collar tasks, Whitman's narrator finds the resources within himself to transform an ordinary scene of returning home from work into a sublime spiritual experience, in which he perceives a bond with all of mankind, past, present and future, as well as with nature and the entire universe in a way that Bartleby and his coworkers never could have imagined.

Mankind as Melville describes it in "Bartleby the Scrivener" is in a highly dismal and alienated state in urban, industrial America. Indeed, this was one of the first such stories to describe the dull, routine and repetitive duties of white-collar workers like Bartleby, who the lawyer narrator calls a "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" person. His work is tedious, although like a robot or an office machine he performs his functions well enough until one day he simply decides that "I would prefer not to." His boss is a "safe" man, calm and forbearing, who spends his days handling the stocks, bonds and mortgages of wealthy capitalists, at least until his own position is finally made redundant as well. All the other members of the staff are equally alienated and underpaid, and lack even the names of human beings. Turkey is an elderly English alcoholic who is always drunk in the afternoons, and the lawyer hints that he should be retired because of his age. Nippers on the other hand is a young, ambitious clerk who does various shady deals on the side and hopes for upward mobility into a professional position, as does Ginger Nut, the office errand boy.

Bartleby is an exhausted, defeated and burned out man, who probably worked in the dead letter section of the post office in Washington before finding this position on Wall Street. Gradually, he just seems to fade away into nothingness, giving up on his work, then his living quarters and finally ending up in prison on a charge of vagrancy, where he starves himself to death. As the lawyer reflects on the immense sadness of the human condition, he states: "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?" He has no friends, family or lovers, and merely exists as the "forlornest" of men until he finally realizes that he would prefer to exist no more. Bartleby is a story that offers no hope for mankind, and no real connection with nature or other human beings, but only lonely, anonymous men lacking souls or emotions, performing empty duties, and no one will really notice or care when they finally die.

Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is narrated by a working-class man in New York, but is not nearly as bleak and despairing as "Bartleby." Instead of isolated, alienated individuals trapped in a meaningless existence, they are all alive a vital, bonded to each other and nature as part of a universal soul. At least, this is the vision that the narrator has at the start of the poem, even though he regards the rest of mankind as "curious" (odd or peculiar) for not being able to perceive the world as he does. They may not realize it, but they are going to "cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, that you might suppose." They symbolize not only the masses riding the ferry on that particularly day, but all passengers who have ever ridden it or ever will in the future, including the readers, and Whitman feels that "Closer yet I approach you." He feels what they do when they look at the "river and sky," and feels refreshed by the scene as they do, and sees the same "numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats."