3.6.4 Melville’s motiveless motionless men

(SPOILER WARNING)

In Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, author Herman Melville presents us with an unnamed protagonist narrator who is passionless, passive and apathetic. Melville pokes fun at this character by juxtaposing him with the outlandish character of Bartleby. In Bartleby, the protagonist is confronted with the reductio ad absurdum of his own attitude toward life.

In his own words, the narrator is a man who believes that the easiest way of life is the best (945). He refers to ambition as an evil power (947), and describes himself as someone who likes a cool business with rich men’s bonds [. . .] (945). He values safety and abhors conflict. "I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages," he tells us (945). Thus, even when he recognizes something as wrong or as an outrage, he prefers not to become involved, not to take action. For the narrator, a strong value or ideal is merely an inconvenient call to unwilling action. The narrator is blissfully unaware that such a thing might be a character flaw. He proudly relates that the great capitalist John Jacob Astor pronounced his first grand point to be prudence, oblivious to the evident facetiousness in referring to prudence as grand (945).

Since the narrator is not interested in high ideals his concerns remain at the level of the mundane. He becomes highly agitated over the ink blots which Turkey, one of his copyists, makes on documents. Yet, when it comes to conflict—to really defending his values he is always ready to invoke some kind of rationale for not taking action. He wants to relieve Turkey of his afternoon duties because of the blots, but, with the twin excuses that he is a man of peace and that he should have some fellow feeling for Turkey because they are both old men, he does nothing (946).

True to this nature, the narrator spends much of the story in a comical process of methodically avoiding the necessity of taking decisive action. The central conflict of the story—Bartleby’s unwillingness to work, and the narrators unhappiness with this fact would not be possible were the narrator someone more proactive. On reading the story it is natural to feel that we would not put up with even the beginnings of Bartleby’s passive resistance. We would throw him out the door immediately. But Melville’s narrator is too much a man of inaction to do that.

When Bartleby refuses to proof some writing he has done with the first uttering of his oft-repeated "I would prefer not to," the narrator does not enter into an argument or kick Bartleby out of the office. Instead, he tells us that my business hurried me, and does the proofing without Bartleby (950). Later, when Bartleby again refuses a request, the narrator tells us that he "would have taken action [w]ith any other man [. . .] [b]ut there was something about Bartleby that [. . .] strangely disarmed me [. . .]" (950).

Despite Bartleby’s obvious unemployability, the narrator chooses to ignore his eccentricities. "As the days passed on, I became considerably reconciled to Bartleby" (953). The narrator would prefer Bartleby’s nearly useless presence to the act of getting rid of him. Only Bartleby’s continued slide into ever deeper and deeper passivity can rouse the narrator to any form of action.

When the narrator comes to his office on Sunday he assumes that Bartleby will not be there. "[T]here was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day," he tells us (954). (Of course the narrator is himself doing just exactly this in going to his office.) But Bartleby is there and the narrator leaves atBartleby’s request, telling us that he feels unmanned by being told by his employee to leave his own office (954). Yet leave it he does, unwilling as he is to enter into any kind of conflict. He goes home, missing church altogether (956). (The narrator characteristically does not appear to possess much in the way of religious idealism.)

Curious about this strange person, the narrator tries to engage Bartleby in a discussion of his past. Bartleby refuses with a volley of I-would-prefer-not-to’s. The narrator wants to dismiss Bartleby for this, but claims to think it might be dangerous, as he feels something vaguely superstitious about it (957). He later says, "[. . .] I must get rid of a demented man, who has turned the tongues, if not the heads, of myself and clerks. But I thought it prudent not to break the dismission at once" (958). Evidently, now the timing is not right—again the narrator has found a reason not to act. Bartleby stops writing altogether. Rather than rid himself of Bartleby once and for all for this total loss of impetus, he decides that Bartleby must have stopped writing due to an impairment of vision brought on by all the hard work (958).

As Bartlebys behavior becomes more and more egregious, the narrator’s excuses for inaction must become correspondingly more and more outlandish. He decides that an effective way to rid himself of Bartleby might be to merely assume that he is already gone. He is even pleased with his cleverness. By making such an assumption he will not have to take any real action to bring it about, and Bartleby will simply have no choice but to comply (960). But Bartleby does not comply.

The situation escalates. It is a battle fought between two people using only passivity and inaction as weapons. It becomes obvious that Bartleby’s eyes are fine, yet he makes the announcement, when pressed, that he intends to do no more writing, bad eyes or good. The narrator, without any basis for giving Bartleby any benefit of the doubt, is faced with the necessity of taking action. But he is reminded of a famous murder, and decides that it would be unwise to do anything that could lead to violence. And he calls to mind a line from a religious text telling us to love one another (961). This is all the excuse he needs. He does nothing at first. Later he does order Bartleby out of the office, but Bartleby does nothing. Instead of calling the police or taking any other action, the narrator consoles himself by reading philosophical tracts that argue against the existence of free will (962). If there is no free will then there is nothing he could have done, or could do, so he does not need to feel compelled to do anything about the situation. It is simply his fate.

Yet if the narrator seems a virtual paragon of passive apathy, he is a life-affirming, proactive dynamo compared to the character of Bartleby. Bartleby is not drawn in the same realistic style as the narrator. The central idea of his character is taken to an absurd extreme. When we first see him, Bartleby is described as a motionless young man (948). He is engaged as a law copyist and sets to work copying. But soon, when he is called upon to proof his work, he gives us a kind of noncommital refusal with the line "I would prefer not to" (949). As the scene progresses he continues to refuse requests with the same response (950). Bartleby cannot be reasoned with. He simply prefers not to.

Bartleby is cartoonishly inactive. He is set up in the narrators office with a screen to separate him from the narrator. He is rarely seen, and the narrator refers to Bartleby’s little area as his hermitage (951). Bartleby never is seen to read, spends hours staring at a wall and is never seen leaving the office (955). He is never seen drinking and rarely seen eating. What he does eat is the little ginger-nut cakes that the office boy brings to him. The narrator wryly wonders about him, "[m]y mind then ran on reveries concerning the possible effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts" (951-952).

Bartleby’s character is flat, in that he is seems to be made up of only a single attribute—lack of motivation—but it is not static. Bartleby does progress through the story: his apathy becomes more and more extreme. By the Sunday on which the narrator stumbles upon Bartleby at the office, the narrator is in the habit of assuming that "[. . .] behind his screen [Bartleby] must be standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his" (956). Monday morning the narrator tries to engage him in a simple conversation about his background, but he prefers not to do even this (956). Bartleby stops writing altogether, saying that he has decided upon doing no more writing (958). Bartlebou’y’s character is being taken to its absurdly logical conclusion, becoming still more a fixture than before (958). He is finally dismissed, but does not leave (960). He is dismissed repeatedly, but still without success. Finally the narrator instead moves his own offices to a new location (963). But Bartleby, by this time nearly totally without motive power simply stays in the old offices. When new tenants move in, they have him removed by the police, whom Bartleby characteristically does not resist (966). Bartleby dies in the local jail, apparently simply starving to death. "He said that he prefers not to dine today, being unused to dining" (967). His motivation is so completely gone that he does not bother to eat. Bartleby simply grinds to a halt.

The mood and style of narration contributes to the dark, but humorous absurdity of Bartleby’s nature. Musing about Bartleby’s consumption of ginger-nuts, the narrator says, "[w]as Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none" (952). Later, in a scene in which the narrator is helpfully trying to suggest possible lines of work, Bartleby finds some reason not to attempt each possibility, but always adds, "[b]ut I am not particular" (965).

Humor is used throughout, even when not directly related to Bartleby. It is used most conspicuously in the comic images of mutual foils, Turkey and Nippers. "After twelve o’clock [. . . Turkey’s face] blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals, we are told" (945). The humor is in Turkey’s groveling attitude in the morning, always beginning his sentences with "[w]ith submission, sir." It is in Nippers silly inability to get his desk into a comfortable position (947) and in the narrators silly observation, "[. . .] precisely as a rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat," comparing Turkey with a cantankerous horse in the afternoons (948). The narrator summarizes the comedy of Turkey and Nippers saying, "I never had to do with their eccentricities at one time. Their fits relieved each other, like guards" (948).

This tone of humor is continually present throughout the story: the narrators ineffectual attempts to sound portentous when talking to Bartleby about his refusal to go to the post office (953); the panic of the new tenants of the old office when they discover Bartleby (964); the narrators ridiculous cutting of the Gordian Knot by simply moving out from under Bartleby (963), and finally his panicked run from the old office after trying to help Bartleby find new employment (965).

The general humor of the story is an undercurrent to the specific absurdity of the character of Bartleby. With this story, Melville seems to be, through the person of Bartleby, poking fun at a particular kind of person, embodied by the narrator. The narrator is driven by no great passions, ideals or values. The closest he has to a value is a general desire not to be too much ruled by values. The mysterious, ethereal Bartleby seems at first a strange juxtaposition against the prudent, practical narrator, but on close examination we see that the two are not so different in kind; they differ only in degree. Bartleby is in fact the narrators doppleganger, exaggerated and distorted, like his image seen in a fun house mirror.

The narrator looks always for the easy way out, for the way to avoid effort or conflict. Bartleby, his caricature, his younger brother in spirit, puts the narrators wish to avoid effort into practice, by simply not taking any form of action. He has gone on strike against life as such. We can almost imagine that the narrator has somehow conjured the chimera-like Bartleby into existence by his own nature, like the Ghost of Christmas Past brought into existence by Ebenezer’s own foibles. Bartleby is a kind of warning to the narrator. His static, silent presence seems to tell the narrator, and to tell us, that if you don’t change your complacent ways, you will end up like me, if not in fact, then in spirit.

Works Cited

Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener: A
Story of Wall Street. Thinking and Writing
About Literature: A Text and Anthology. Ed.
Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,
2001.

English Lit paper, May 12, 2002