Power and Passivity in Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener
This essay analyzes Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a study of the employer-employee relationship and the nature of workplace authority. Through close reading of the narrator's responses to Bartleby's passive refusal to work, the paper argues that Melville deliberately inverts the traditional power dynamic between boss and subordinate. Bartleby's intransigence exposes the narrator's patronizing assumptions and reveals that managerial authority depends entirely on the employee's willingness to comply. The essay also examines the story's intentional ambiguity regarding Bartleby's motivations and connects his resistance to a broader rejection of economic ideology and the social assumptions underlying labor.
- Introduction: Comedy, Tragedy, and the Workplace: Story's tone and central relationship introduced
- Character Dynamics and the Decision to Hire Bartleby: Minor characters and narrator's motivations for hiring
- Passive Resistance and the Realignment of Power: Narrator's failed responses shift workplace authority
- Bartleby's Ambiguous Rebellion: Intentional ambiguity behind Bartleby's refusals
- The Paradox of Power Through Inaction: Bartleby gains control through passivity and inaction
- Conclusion: Consent, Authority, and Economic Ideology: Employer power depends on employee consent
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay builds a clear, sustained argument — that Bartleby's passivity inverts the employer-employee power dynamic — and returns to it in every paragraph, maintaining strong analytical focus throughout.
- It uses specific textual evidence with direct quotations and page citations to support each interpretive claim, grounding literary analysis in the primary source.
- The paper connects close reading to a broader conceptual claim (the analogy between employer authority and governmental consent) that elevates the analysis beyond plot summary.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic close reading: rather than summarizing the story's events, it traces a single theme — the nature of workplace power — through specific character interactions, narrative choices, and authorial ambiguity. The observation that Melville's refusal to explain Bartleby's motives mirrors Bartleby's own refusal to engage is a strong example of form-content analysis, showing how narrative structure reinforces meaning.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a framing claim about the story's tone and central relationship, then moves through character introduction, the narrator's failed responses, Bartleby's intentional ambiguity, the paradox of passive power, and finally a synthesizing conclusion that broadens the argument to societal and political implications. Each paragraph advances the argument rather than simply describing plot events.
Introduction: Comedy, Tragedy, and the Workplace
Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener" is an alternately comedic and tragic look at the relationship between an employer and his employee. Examining how this relationship plays out reveals the complexities of managing a workplace and the sometimes overlooked nuances of the power dynamic present in this kind of relationship.
Character Dynamics and the Decision to Hire Bartleby
The character of Bartleby represents the inversion of the narrator's own character and ideals, because he offers what is essentially the perfect challenge to the narrator's pride in both his business acumen and his self-assured sense of generosity. The major players in the story are Bartleby and the narrator, although the minor characters of Nippers, Turkey, and Ginger Nut serve to explain and partially justify the narrator's decision to hire Bartleby in the first place. The fact that Nippers is never productive in the morning and Turkey is never productive in the afternoon leads the narrator to choose Bartleby to fill the position suddenly made available by the narrator's increased business, because he believes that "a man of so singularly sedate an aspect [...] might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers" (Melville, 1853, p. 549).
While the narrator is not at all likable or sympathetic at the beginning of the story — due to the fact that he spends an inordinate amount of time puffing up his own reputation — Bartleby initially appears in a sympathetic light, portrayed as "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!" (p. 546–7, 549). However, this initial impression changes as the story continues and the narrator is confronted by Bartleby's intransigence. Even then, the narrator cannot bring himself to truly dislike Bartleby.
Passive Resistance and the Realignment of Power
For almost the entirety of the story, the narrator is completely at a loss as to how he should respond to Bartleby's refusal to work, because "nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance" (Melville, 1853, p. 551). After a few failed attempts to get Bartleby to do anything other than copy texts "at the usual rate of four cents a folio," the narrator simply gives up, and even comes to appreciate Bartleby, at least because he is always there (p. 552–553). He has sympathy for Bartleby because of the latter's ability to remain wholly unfazed by the world around him, something the narrator assumes is born out of deep-seated depression.
However, this is where the narrator makes his first mistake. Rather than realizing that Bartleby's successful refusal has caused a fundamental realignment of the power dynamic between employer and employee, the narrator's pity for Bartleby means that Bartleby has almost total control over the narrator's thoughts and emotions — as evidenced by the fact that the narrator cannot even escape his memories of Bartleby after the latter man's death. The narrator should either fire Bartleby immediately following his first refusal, or else expect absolutely nothing of him; instead, he continuously tries to get Bartleby to open up.
Conclusion: Consent, Authority, and Economic Ideology
In "Bartleby the Scrivener," Herman Melville discusses the relationship between employee and employer through the characters of the narrator and Bartleby, and in doing so implicitly argues that the power of the employer is only born out of the implicit acceptance of the employee — in the same way that governments may ultimately only gain their power from the explicit or implicit consent of the governed. The more that Bartleby refuses to work, the more the narrator finds himself inextricably under Bartleby's spell, because Bartleby's passive resistance serves to undermine the narrator's assumptions regarding what drives human beings.
By the end of the story, the narrator finally begins to realize that he does not understand humanity, because in death, Bartleby has succeeded in resisting the economic ideology that assumes all people should desire to labor in the pursuit of money and, ultimately, sustenance. By allowing himself to waste away while forever enshrining himself in the narrator's troubled memory, Bartleby inverts the traditional balance of power between employer and employee.
References
Melville, H. (1853). Bartleby the scrivener. Putnam's Monthly, 2, 546–557, 609–615. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=Ck8AAAAAYAAJ
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