it seems to be vaguely in fashion to post school-work to Everything. so hell, I've got an essay or two kicking around that doesn't make me look like a complete simp. here's one on "Bartleby," which by the way is an excellent short story by Herman Melville.
is it a high school essay? a poorly editted freshman attempt? a bona fide polished college work, just ripe for the picking? the ramblings of a homeless man which I scribbled down by candlelight under a bridge? I leave it to both the readers to make that determination. the rest of you who were looking for some serious node but not this, move along.
.
Several years ago, a friend of mine was relating to me and some other people a story he had read for some English class. We were a group of future engineers and scientists, so we were not much up on the classics of literature, or even popular works not related in some way to science or technology. "It was the story" (said the friend) "of this stupid guy, and all he would ever say was 'I prefer not to.' 'I prefer not to, I prefer not to,' 'til at last he died at the end and that was it. What a weird book!" I tell this anecdote ('s a true story), because I kept remembering it while reading "Bartleby," and because it serves as a segue into my point: engineers' literal thinking aside, "Bartleby" is a strange story, and it is so because that is what makes it work as a satire, which is the main point of the text. A satire is a story that emphasizes certain traits of characters or setting to an extreme, in order to point out in a graphic and sometimes humourous fashion the faults of these traits in their normal existence. In particular, it is the descriptions of Bartleby, his employer, and their interactions that provide the key satirical elements of the story. With these, Melville satirizes the relationship between the dispassionate Bartleby and his kindly employer, showing the underlying incongruity between helping a person and using them for labor.
Bartleby is quite an odd character; he is not a very realistic person, his main traits are the exaggerated but logical conclusions of his circumstances. Bartleby worked in the dead letter office, committing letters to flame. Bartleby could not have been passionate about his work, for every page he touched was a person who had died, to feel any empathy would be only to bring misery on one's self. He must have had to work efficiently and mechanically, for there is not much art in the sifting through of envelopes before destroying them. Indeed, when the narrator of the story first gets the opportunity to observe Bartleby, these are the traits he notices.
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sunlight and by candlelight. I should have been delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on, palely, mechanically. (9)
Perhaps Bartleby was eager to create letters after so much time spent destroying them. In any case, Bartleby is described by the narrator as being peculiarly cheerless and mechanical. His primary characteristics, as evoked by every utterance of his catch-phrase "I would prefer not to," are indifference and detachment. Bartleby has no desires. He is almost dead to the world, and often clothed in death-related images. Here, for example, his employer entreats him to engage in labor: "'At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,' was his mildly cadaverous reply" (19). Not only is he describes as being like a cadaver, but he says that he has no preference towards being reasonable, a word which in this case may mean having the faculty of reason.
Comparitively, Bartleby's employer, the narrator of the story, is somewhat closer to a realistic person, but he too has a primary trait that is exaggerated and held up to display. The narrator is a man who feels great compassion towards those beneath him, often coupled with a sense of pity or an obligation toward helping them. Of his views on the matter, he writes: "charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle -- a great safeguard to its possessor... self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy" (25). Throughout the story the narrator tells of feelings of compassion for Bartleby, and his actions show a constant (if superficial) regard for his employees.
Toward Bartleby, the narrator is drawn to ever higher levels of pity, and driven to aid the pale clerk. Though his efforts at charity are somewhat blocked by his failure to fully apprehend the situation, outwardly he shows nothing less than a full effort to rescue Bartleby. He relates: "In plain fact, Bartleby had now become a millstone to me, not only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear. Yet I was sorry for him" (21). The narrator is not just a little sorry for Bartleby; over the course of the story Bartleby is a fairly regular visitor to the thoughts and concerns of the narrator. When the narrator walks down the street, he imagines that the people he passes are discussing whether or not Bartleby will leave his offices. He finds that the word "prefer" has slipped into the common vocabulary of himself and his other employees. And with this constant presence of Bartleby in his thoughts, the narrator retains his constant position of kindliness and aid towards Bartleby. He is in it to the end, following Bartleby to Bartleby's final destination, the Tombs, and telling the guard "I want you to give particular attention to my friend there; let him have the best dinner you can get. And you must be as polite to him as possible" (32).
But ultimately, the employer can give Bartleby nothing. This is the fault that Melville magnifies with his story, the one whose very real presense in real life he wishes to call attention to. After the narrator has barred Bartelby from his offices, he continues to press the scrivener to accept his aid. He inquires of Bartleby whether Bartleby would enjoy some other kind of labor, and names various occupations in which he could set up Bartleby in. Bartleby's reply is quite the same at each instance: "I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular" (30). Bartleby has no desire to accept the assistance of his former employer. This is in part because Bartleby has no desires at all, but also because Bartleby has rejected the idea in doing work for an employer (having seen the meaninglessness of it after, upon being swept from his former post by event not under his control), and now the employer has no power over him, to help or to harm.
With their respective attitudes, Bartleby and the narrator pass each other without ever connecting. The premise of the story, that Bartleby would "prefer not to," is the clearest metaphor for this disconnectedness. What could be stranger than a man ordering another to obey and receiving only the cryptic reply "I would prefer not to?" What else but a man being ordered in such a fashion that all society dictates his obedience, yet he stands as still as a caryatid. The two share the same room for a time, yet at no time do their purposes ever touch. For example, when the narrator wants Bartleby the examine a copy, he commands the clerk "in haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance" (10). He sits at his desk with a piece of paper extended out into the room as he writes with his head down. But Bartleby does not appear to grab the duplicate. It remains offered to empty space, the link between employer and employee being broken, and no connection, physical or otherwise, being made.
The satire hits home as the nuances of the relationship between Bartleby and the narrator are fleshed out. A key point of satire is that the exaggeration of certain aspects of a situation draws it not only into relief, but into absurdity as well. The narrator's comfortable existence is disturbed by the necessity of dealing with this strange scrivener. His inner thoughts are thus rendered to us: "For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but unpleasing sadness... Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none" (17).
If the narrator feels confounded and confronted by contact with Bartleby, how is the reader to feel, having to reconcile both personages -- Bartleby and the narrator -- to herself? The narrator is alive to the absurdity of employing a clerk who does not do a clerk's work, who eventually does nothing at all. But there is a fundamental absurdity in the actions of the narrator towards Bartleby. As if Bartleby were the rightful occupant of his offices, the narrator packs up his things and moves his offices, just to be rid of the doleful scrivener, in the following fashion:
On the appointed day I engaged carts and men, proceeded to my chambers, and, having but little furniture, everything was removed in a few hours. Throughout, the scrivener remained standing behind the screen, which I directed to be removed the last thing. It was withdrawn; and, being folded up like a huge folio, left him the motionless occupant of the naked room. (28)
It is a fanciful image, a thin and sallow man standing motionless in a room as all the furniture is removed, an image of the absurdity to which the interaction between these two men is reduced.
There is a point this strangeness, as alluded to up front. Bartleby has been displaced from his job and has through some unknown process given up on the entire idea of working for a living. The narrator of the story, in his desire to do good through well-meaning acts of charity, attempts to help Bartleby. But the narrator's power over people comes only through their desire to do his labor, and Bartleby has none. The situation does not work. And in the incongruous nature of the events that transpire, it is shown by inference that the use of a person for labor is incompatible with compassion, or any other gesture that would improve that person's lot in life.
And so it transpires that all the narrator's efforts at ameliorating Bartleby's condition fall away ineffectively. He is left touched by this experience, contemplating silently to himself the nature of dead letters and dead men. But the narrator's unsettled state of mind is merely part of the larger state of absurdity enacted in the story, and while the narrator has been shown a singular chain of events, it is the reader that has been shown the utter inability of labor to produce some sort of uplifting benefit to the worker. Ah humanity, indeed.
Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno. Dover: New York, 1990.