The Finite and Infinite in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Introduction: Bartleby as Everyman

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 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 essay analyzes Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" and shows 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.

The Dead Letter Office and the Loss of Faith

Bartleby's predicament — and ours, and all humanity's, as the narrator laments at the end of the tale — begins similarly to Bartleby's own story 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 once more 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 reality 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 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.

Conclusion: Charity and the Infinite

We who find ourselves in the position of Bartleby — orphans of the past, in poverty due to financial straits forced upon us by the irresponsible financing of Wall Street — are lost without charity. Some may attempt to provide it in finite ways, but the true charity that Bartleby and Everyman seek does not come from the money men or the politicians: it comes from the soulful, who have received the promise that in many cases only goes to rot in the "Dead Letter" office.

"Bartleby the Scrivener" is a letter simply waiting for us to discover it — to spur us on to greater ambitions than the apprehension of the finite. Melville encourages us to seek the infinite: the infinite that the age of faith held before the Puritanism of the modern age took it away. In this sense, the story functions not merely as a portrait of one peculiar clerk but as a moral diagnosis of an entire civilization adrift from its spiritual moorings, capable of bustling endlessly yet incapable of answering the one question that Bartleby, in his silence, will not stop asking.