Bartleby the Scrivener: Analysis, Themes & Characters
This paper offers a comprehensive literary analysis of Herman Melville's 1853 short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Beginning with a plot summary, the paper traces Bartleby's enigmatic refusals and gradual withdrawal from society, then profiles the story's main characters—the unnamed narrator, Bartleby, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut. The analysis examines multiple critical interpretations, including the story as an Occupy Wall Street allegory, as a meditation on conscience, and as commentary on 19th-century labor relations. The paper also explores the story's dominant themes: the nature of work and obligation, verbal and non-verbal communication, and the tension between separation and integration in human life.
- Introduction: Story's significance and range of interpretations
- Plot Summary: Bartleby's refusals, decline, and death
- Analysis: Critical readings: Occupy allegory and conscience mirror
- Characters: Narrator, Bartleby, Turkey, Nippers, Ginger Nut
- Themes: Work, communication, separation, and integration
- Conclusion: Story's enduring relevance and interpretive openness
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its analysis in direct textual quotations from Melville, allowing claims about character and theme to be supported by specific evidence rather than general assertion.
- Multiple critical interpretations are presented side by side—the Occupy Wall Street reading, the conscience-mirror reading, and the human-condition reading—giving the analysis intellectual range without losing coherence.
- The character sketches are concise yet precise, using the narrator's own language to convey personality, which keeps the paper close to the primary source.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates multi-perspectival literary analysis: rather than committing to a single thesis, it surveys several scholarly interpretations (Greenberg, Buonocore, Kahn) and evaluates how each illuminates a different facet of the text. This approach is especially appropriate for a work as deliberately ambiguous as Melville's, and it models how to synthesize secondary sources with primary textual evidence without letting one interpretation crowd out the others.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a clear expository structure: an introduction establishing the story's significance and interpretive range, a detailed plot summary, an extended analysis section examining critical readings, a character overview with labeled subsections, and a thematic section organized around three distinct motifs. The conclusion and brief closing paragraph return to the question of the story's lasting relevance, framing the analysis as an ongoing interpretive project rather than a settled verdict.
Introduction
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville is one of his most elusive and compelling short stories—one that most critics deem to be his ultimate masterpiece. A primary reason critics herald it as such is that it can be interpreted in so many ways: as a supernatural tale, as a psychological projection, as a comedy of the modern workplace, as an indictment of the modern workplace, as a meditation on the human condition, and in numerous other ways. It is also important to note that this story marked a break from Melville's more typical adventure tales of the era. Instead, he trained a razor-sharp gaze on the mundaneness of the human condition, suggesting answers to its most mysterious conundrums. Literature is, after all, a study of human existence, and this short story highlights the incomprehensibility of the minutiae of human interaction in the workplace.
Analyzing Bartleby, the Scrivener empowers the reader to be illuminated by the numerous facets that make the short story an evaluation of capitalism in America, nineteenth-century labor relations, stifled homoeroticism, or a coded enigma tied to one of the many texts that influenced Melville (Kahn). To analyze this masterpiece is to commit to confronting its elusiveness, its mercurial nature, and the paradox at its core. Humans need to protect their individuality while also nurturing their sense of social interdependence in order to survive. Bartleby, the Scrivener shows what happens when individuality is selected over all else to the point of self-destruction. This is but one interpretation of a multifaceted work of art, from which many interpretations may emerge.
Works Cited
Buonocore, Andrew. "BartlebyAnalysis - LawContempSoc - TWiki." Eben Moglen, 2012, moglen.law.columbia.edu/twiki/bin/view/LawContempSoc/BartlebyAnalysis. Accessed 9 July 2018.
Greenberg, Jonathan D. "Occupy Wall Street's Debt to Melville." The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/occupy-wall-streets-debt-to-melville/256482/.
Kahn, Andrew. "Finally! The Interactive, Annotated Edition of 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' You Always Wanted." Slate Magazine, 22 Oct. 2015, www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herman_melville_s_bartleby_the_scrivener_an_interactive_annotated_text.html. Accessed 9 July 2018.
Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-street." Eben Moglen, moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf. Accessed 9 July 2018.
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