MELVILLE'S RADICAL RESISTANCE: THE METHOD AND MEANING OF BARTLEBY*

KINGSLEY WIDMER
Bartleby, subtitled "The Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street" (1853), was Melville's first long story, or novella.
Because of its marked departure in form and style from his earlier fictions, and because of its apparent
nihilism, many find it a puzzling work. Not surprisingly, therefore, much of the critical discussion seems
perverse in efforts to remake this enigmatic fable. I suggest that we accept much of the enigma, especially that
of the entitling character who provides the usual focus of contention, and put the emphasis on Melville's
dialectics. Certainly part of the charm of the tale comes from the fusion of comedy and pathos, a result of the
unresolvable ambiguities of the character of Bartleby. This "absurdist" tone reenforces the author's true theme
which, I shall argue, is not an explanation of Bartleby but a justification of his refusals, a radical resistance to
much of Melville's world--and ours.
But first the usual perplexed questions: Who is the strange Bartleby? What in his character makes him "prefer
not to" do anything and everything? What does he stand for? Bartleby was a mysteriously eccentric law clerk,
who politely refused to do his work, perversely refused either to give reasons or to leave, and, in the end,
forlornly refused to go on living. But once the reader attempts to construct a pattern of character beyond these
sparse facts, the interpretation becomes forced. With some authors, we find an implicit logic by which we may
assume a past and pattern for the character, but Melville carefully rejects this possibility at thc start of the
story: "Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable . . . ." The development of the story
substantiates the statement. Thus, Bartleby should remain enigmatic to the reader and our attention should
not focus on explaining--and explaining away--this demand on consciousness and conscience but on his
significance. However, exasperated readers without a taste for Melville's ambiguities attempt to give too solid
flesh to the reverberating metaphysical terms with which Melville describes the figure--"mystery," "solitude,"
"forlornness," "preference," "will," "perverseness," and so on. These simply must be taken as fundamental
conditions of existence. Our only choice is in our recognition of them and our attitude towards them. Bartleby,
then, may be best summarized in his own delightful and sad "I prefer not to"; several dozen times repeated,
this disconcerting mixture of politeness and defiance, this summary phrase of the whole of a radically passive
resistance, is the major resonant moral of the tale, and one we should refrain from undermining.
Before analyzing some of the representative American failures of response to this wry rebellion which Melville
presents, we might glance at some representative critical avoidances of the issues. Confronted with the
enigmatic and ambiguous, some look for a "key" to secret meaning and purpose. So with many readers of
Bartleby. For example: Could the story be a puzzle because the author was covertly writing about someone he
knew? Melville did have an uncle-attorney with offices in the Wall Street district; he also had a friend who
worked in a law office and ended in a mental hospital. Such sources certainly could have provided satiric and
pathetic material for the tale, though the source information hardly explains the peculiarities of Bartleby or the
arguments of the narrator. As presented, the story seems far less related to any such Wall Street actualities
than to certain recurrent intellectual preoccupations of Melville. For instance, the criticism of the benevolently
rationalizing American and the method of elaborately developing and undercutting rationalizations, as is found
in Benito Cereno, show an immediate relevance to Bartleby which Melville's biography does not.

Could Melville have been doing a satiric though abstracted sketch of some famous person? Several have
been suggested, such as Henry David Thoreau. Bartleby's corner of the office is several times called a
"hermitage," its occupant a "vegetarian," and, most important, he practices "passive resistance." But obviously
not much other similarity to the hero-writing of Walden and Civil Disobedience can be found in the withdrawn
and willfully silent Wall Street law clerk. The comparison of Bartleby and Thoreau produces only a mildly
interesting association of ideas and does not explain or illuminate much of the story.
More farfetched analogies, partly dependent on scholarly knowledge of Melville's reading, have been
suggested. Bartleby gets variously described as a Christian hermit or a Buddhistic contemplative or a Hindu
saint. (The most appropriate such free association might well be with a Taoist.) Since almost any parabolic
literary figure can suggest some similarities with some part or other of the great religious symbologies--for that
is what they are for--such comparisons usually depend more on their own ingenuity than on Melville's. And
though it is a pleasant learned game, the drawing of parallels does not tell us much. Loose equivalents neither
explain nor explicate.
Certainly the parallels need not be, and have not been, confined to the obvious world religions. Melville's prose
reflects not only bits of oriental mythology and the Bible--and more importantly, sceptical religious philosophy-but also the burlesque humor of Charles Lamb, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, among others. To some
readers, the allegorical manner of Bartleby suggests indebtedness to the tales of Hawthorne and Poe. But a
much closer series of parallels can be found: the paired figures (victim and reasoner), the overwhelming
images of melancholy isolation, the dialectics about freedom of the will and fate--and much else--show major
similarities to certain works of one Herman Melville. So perhaps we should treat the novella as primarily
Melville's, and primarily itself. The figure of Bartleby may more profitably be used as a source than as the
derivative of other sources: an archetypal figure on which to base comparisons, the ultimate passive resistor
who sacrificially defies the conventional limits and barriers to the annihilating awareness of life.
The most often insisted upon "key" to Bartleby does base itself on Melville, but in a rather reductive
autobiographical identification. The logic usually goes something like this: Melville was a forlorn writer,
especially since his previous ambitious works (the unique Moby-Dick and the muddled Pierre) did badly in
earning money and praise and understanding; the forlorn Bartleby was a scrivener and scriveners write
(actually, they only copy); in sum, writer Bartleby is writer Melville and expresses the author's sense of despair
in midnineteenth century America which allowed little recognition or place to a serious--a critical and
pessimistic--artist. Some crude political ideologists add, apparently since Bartleby is subtitled "A Story of Wall
Street," that it must also be an attack on American capitalism's mistreatment of intellectual writers.
Without going into the merits of American treatment of intellectuals and artists (who often seem to be
extravagantly rewarded if they suit the purposes of certain markets or cliques), Bartleby certainly does not
provide much of a case against Wall Street capitalists and American commercialism. Money, the narrator
repeatedly notes, is not an issue for Bartleby. Melville's Wall Street does not serve in its later propagandistic
function as an image of financial power and manipulation but as a metaphysical metaphor of confinement and
of barriers to understanding. Certainly the plight of lonely and drudging clerks informs the story but they,
unfortunately, are not peculiar to capitalism and America. As an economic critique, the novella would only
provide an ornately obtuse and irrelevant allegory. But that may well be the fault of those who insist on a
reading of paranoid autobiography.

What, in terms of broader symptons, of the equation of Melville with forlorn "writer" Bartleby? Only one
passage at the end of the story could suggest much substance to such a narrowly circular equation of author
and character. (The actual process of fantasy-projection, of course, usually reveals its significance in
discrepancy rather than similarity--the impotent clerk who imagines himself a lusty adventurer, the
introspective writer who dramatizes himself as a decisive leader, etc.) The narrating attorney says, after
Bartleby's death, that he has acquired a "vague report," never verified, that Bartleby once worked in the "Dead
Letter Office." Now, as we shall see in discussing the narrator, this sort of rationalizing away a present issue in
terms of a reductive cause quite fits the attorney and the argument Melville makes about him. However, if we
take the vague rumor literally as one of the few facts explaining Bartleby, and then rather arbitrarily ask how it
could be applied to Melville, we can come up with several rough equations. For one, Bartleby lost his job in the
Dead Letter Office "by a change in the administration." Melville, of course, was writing in the pre-civil service
days of political patronage. It is also true that Melville's relatives were trying to get the writer, who did not make
a very adequate living for his family, a political appointment, and later did in the New York customs house. But
of possible greater importance is the metaphor of "dead letters." Was Melville referring to his own writings as
"dead letters"?
"Conceive," says the narrator, "a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any
business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting
them for the flames?" And, after citing several maudlin examples, he concludes, "On errands of life, these
letters speed to death." Certainly this passage could be covertly intensified by Melville's feelings about the
public failure of his own writings and a sense of them as dead letters to humanity. But Bartleby develops at
length some larger themes, including the failure of communication, which the metaphor of dead letters aptly
supports Whatever personal sense of defeat Melville may draw upon, as man and writer, here he seems to
lament not just himself but the larger isolation of man and the frequent futility of his endeavours.
Such larger philosophical concerns would be consistent with what Melville does in his other works. To
emphasize the meaning of the story as Melville's personal pathos really ignores most of the story, which has
little to do with the historic Melville, artists, "dead letters," or any other reasonably related topic. As a document
in self-pity the story tells us so little, and in such an irrelevant way, that it could well be dismissed by all but
pedantic specialists in Melville. Yet, since many apt readers find the experience of the novella a moving one,
we should not reduce it to an awkward footnote in the author's case history. Biographical allegorizing,
especially within a reductive social ideology, treats art as conspiratorial camouflage for self-pity and usually
best fits bad writings by the most conventional people. Biography, done with social and psychological subtlety
and with a dramatic sense of eternal human predicaments, can be a fascinating subject. But it will not serve as
an adequate substitute for the other truths of the literary and philosophical mind.
Thus, if we take the story seriously and in its own right, we must pay close attention to the directions Melville
gives. The essential fact of the story is that we have just one full character, the narrating attorney. Not only
does all the story come from him, but his character and consciousness and self-arguments are the story. The
enigmatic Bartleby and the other materials, such as the two minor scriveners, provide simply the occasion for
the narrator-attorney's responses. We see what he sees, with particular emphasis upon his limitations in
explaining and justifying himself. Bartleby does the refusing, the nay-saying, and not much more; the narrator
does the explaining for both. Our questions, then, must be directed at the narrator, rather than at Bartleby. The

peculiarities of the narrator's inner dialogue, repeatedly emphasized, provide the meaning of the grotesque
comedy. He sees Bartleby, I shall argue, as the specter of rebellious and irrational human will, whose very
existence he denies. That there could be such a possibility as Bartleby, a refusal to abide by his version of
reasonableness and practical adjustment and repressive prudence, perplexes and haunts him. The attorney
feels impelled to explain, and explain away, what Bartleby represents to him: perverse individual will and
pessimistic human forlornness. What Melville mocks in Bartleby parallels Benito Cereno. It is a sympathetic
but ironic critical analysis of the practical optimist, the blandly benevolent rationalist, as a representative liberal
American. The narrating attorney, like Captain Delano and Captain Vere in Melville's other novellas, provides
an image of a decent, well-meaning, prudent, rationalizing enforcer of established values. Such figures
miserably fail in a deeper awareness of humanity. Melville thus indicts, I believe, one of the major traditions of
what has passed for normal reasonableness, in our time as well as in his time.
Before looking at the narrating attorney's self-arguments about the perverse individual will of Bartleby, we
might briefly consider the scene. "Wall Street" should not primarily be taken in its political sense because in
the description Melville plays upon the pun rather than the economics. Walls, dead walls of restriction and
incomprehension, block everything. One side of the lawyer's chambers face a white wall, the other side a
black wall. But we have here no significant black-white conflict in the usual moral sense since both walls are
equally dead and entrapping, with the white one forming a stagnant "cistern." Bartleby, who spends much of
his time in "dead-wall reveries," gets further walled into the attorney's private chamber and consciousness
(however ignored) by a screen placed around him. The walls of the metaphoric abstract scene find several
other extensions, as in the repeated allusions to other walls. Several refer to classic ruins--the futility of dead
walls in keeping civilization human. The capping metaphor of walls of death seems to be the exceptionally
heavy and grim ones of the "Halls of Justice," the New York "Tombs" prison. This is compared to that
monumental futility, the Egyptian pyramids. Notes the narrator of Bartleby's final place of confinement, the
"Egyptian character of that masonary weighed upon me with its gloom." The walled-in lawyer, involved in the
deadening laws of chancery, fails to recognize himself as part of the walls of gloom and the mortuary process
of deadening civilization.
One may, of course, find similar analogies in Melville's other writings. The most noted one is Ahab's remark in
Moby-Dick that the "dead blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last." Melville thinks in such metaphysical
metaphors. Other extensions of the analogy may be found in what else Melville does emphasize about Wall
Street, its collection of law offices and lawyers. Not only dead laws, such as those of chancery, but the deadly
legal logic of the attorney confines him from any fuller understanding of his scrivener and the forlorn human
condition he represents. The dreary legal copying in the office also defies human responsiveness. In most of
his works, Melville mocks the legalistic mind and its destruction of the human. Dead walls, dead laws, and
"Dead Letters" merge in a comprehensive image--the law as a dead letter, and a deathly wall to the
authentically human.
The answer to the enigma of Bartleby, then, must be found in reading the story in a sufficiently "abstract" or
philosophical sense. This applies to the characters as well as the scenes and metaphors and dialogue. Little
effort is made to present Bartleby in "realistic" senses; we only see him as "incurably forlorn" and in similar
generalized ways. The author, as with his dead-walls and dead letters, even jokingly plays upon the
abstractness of the scrivener; says the attorney, "had there been anything ordinarily human about him,

doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises." For Bartleby serves, repeatedly, as his
"ghost," the conscience "haunting" the attorney, his moral "albatross," the embarrassing secret and continual
inhabitant of his walled-in chambers and mind.
The narrator is the problem himself for the novella, with Bartleby serving as an abstract personification of his
dilemma. He characterizes himself at the start as a reflective man and "an eminently safe man" whose two
"grand" qualities are "prudence" and "method." The limits of such deadly safety provide the method of the
story. A commercial attorney, specializing in probate and rich men's bonds, he smugly associates himself with
the high opinion of John Jacob Astor. Protected by the barriers of social and economic legalisms, his office is
really a "retreat" from common humanity. Law for this attorney connects not at all with morality. He lacks any
passion for justice and does not "indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages." His strong
responses come only from selfishness, such as at the abolition of his sinecure of Master in Chancery (i. e., in
probate of death testaments, a traditionally lucrative lawyer's exploitation harshly satirized in Dickens' Bleak
House, of which the 1852 serialization could be a source here). This representative figure of the world of
prudent privilege, a genially rational bachelor conformingly committed to authority and "common usage," selfindulgently holds the "profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best."
With elaborate wryness, Melville presents some of the absurdity of the attorney's view in the grotesque
description of his office--dominated by life-denying walls--and his staff. He has long had a pair of irrational
scriveners, Turkey and Nippers. Presented as Dickensian humor-caricatures, they provide a comic-grotesque
foreshadowing of the lawyer's attempt to rationalize the irrational with Bartleby. One, a confirmed drunkard,
works as a good copyist in the mornings but is of little use after his liquid lunch. The other, dyspeptic and
ambitiously irritable in the mornings, resigns himself to productive tedium in the afternoons. In spite of the
absurdity, the attorney decides that since their "fits relieved each other" it provided "a good natural
arrangement" for getting a full day's work done. Thus conflicting individual motives manage to produce a
parody of Adam Smith's general harmony and public welfare. The attorney claims to have rationalized
individual selfishness and mania into a utilitarian good.
Turkey and Nippers each reveal a startling, and often violently arrogant, self-regard, incongruous to their
menial roles, except for the absurdly methodological master who can turn any individuality into prudent profit.
When Bartleby, the new scrivener, joins them, he actually appears the less eccentric and resistant--until he
refuses to allow himself to be absorbed into the rationalized utility. His repeated "I prefer not to" do what
convention demands, though first blandly covered over by the attorney, leads to a threatening new awareness:
for "the first time in my life . . . overpowering . . . melancholy seized upon me. The bond of a common
humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom." Bartleby's contrariety forces the narrator to recognize a whole
side of life which he has systematically denied.
A genially selfish man, full of comically smug certitudes, the labyrinth of human existence now opens before
him. The attorney "begins to stagger in his own plainest faith." And he overwhelmingly comes to suspect that
madly defiant Bartleby is right, that "all the justice and all the reason is on the other side." The larger part of
the narrative consists of the attorney's various stratagems to reestablish his utilitarian reason and his faith in
prudent selfishness.

Thinking of sad and solitary Bartleby, the attorney moves through pity to melancholy to fear to repulsion. That
provides an apt summary of our frequent responses to victims, which end in hostility. Though the narrator soon
falls back into his usual "prudential feeling," he has been on the threshold of the pessimistic knowledge that
human suffering is less to be understood in terms of "inherent selfishness" than as a more fundamental
"hopelessness." Such awareness "disqualified" the attorney, for that day at least, "from churchgoing."
The attorney's rationality repeatedly comes up against something that goes deeper, "some paramount
consideration" in Bartleby's behavior that makes his denials "irreversible." That paramount force is individual
will. Using his fantastic rationality, the attorney debates with himself why Bartleby apparently subsists only on
the little cakes called "ginger nuts." They are hot and spicy, and Bartleby is anything but. Therefore only some
strange preference can explain it. But that explains nothing except the primacy of preference itself. So with
Bartleby's "I prefer not to."
To rid himself of the irrationality of will, the narrator persuasively tells his copyist to leave and generously offers
him a present (later he admits to himself that it was a "bribe") Then he congratulates himself on his "masterly
management" in getting rid of the "incubus" that defied his decency and reasons. "I assumed the ground that
depart he must. . . ." But his little demon prefers not to leave. Desperate, the rationalist then carries his
calculated decency contrary to fact; he will force Bartleby to leave by assuming, in front of him, that he has left.
To the unintentionally humorous narrator, "It was hardly possible that Bartleby could withstand such an
application of the doctrine of assumptions." But the perverse imp replies, for the seventeenth time, "I would
prefer not to." Or? as he earlier put his defiance of reason by will: "I would prefer not to be a little reasonable."
Bartleby, of course, has chosen the right tactic to confront the attorney, who can never quite act brutally
because of the disarming "wonderful mildness" of his scrivener. As has now become a strategic recognition in
protest movements, civil disobedience provides an effective way of moral confrontation of the would-be decent
and rational "liberal"; as the attorney says, "nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."
Nor can he directly call the police since he must claim to act within the limits of the decent and rational mind
(but he can later let somebody else call the police to haul Bartleby away). When his assumptions do not work,
the narrator falls into despair. So he looks into "Edwards on the Will" and "Priestly on Necessity." Bartleby, we
see, is the intellectual dilemma of the civilized narrator who wishes not to confront rebellious irrationality by
personal decision but by bookish moral logic.
Learned arguments, of course, do not answer the issue since the narrator concludes, from his theological and
scientific sources, that his scrivener-troubles "had been predestined from eternity." With religious smugness,
he decides that "Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of all wise Providence."
Protestant determinism and morality, however, never adequately meet the social issue; because of the social
pressure of his lawyer colleagues, the narrator escapes Bartleby and metaphysical necessity by moving to
another office and leaving his demon behind. Not only does he hope to eliminate "such perverseness--such
unreasonableness," and the comic contagion in which everyone in his office now starts to "prefer" this or that,
but he attempts to escape a larger awareness: "Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered around me." as
with Melville's other anti-human decent rationalists, God and morality are on his side--"my conscience justified
me"--but he fears the possibility of finding out more ominous and nihilistic truths about the universe.

Thus Bartleby is removed from the old chambers as a vagrant-- even now the favorite catch-all law used
against protest--though, as the attorney concludes in his hilariously methodical reasoning, Bartleby's fault is
that he is not vagrant enough. The attorney remains obsessively preoccupied with Bartleby as if he were a
secret part of himself. Some readers, therefore, describe the tale as a study in "schizophrenia." Perhaps more
appropriate here than the clinical category would be the related literary motif of "the double," which also
appears in other works of Melville's (Delano-Cereno, Vere-Budd, Ahab-Ishmael, etc.). The author
psychologically splits or doubles his character to dramatize an internal conflict, as in Dostoyevsky's "The
Double" and Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." The fusion of the pragmatically moral attorney and the mutedly
demonic scrivener can be viewed as such a double. In this comedy of incomprehension, Bartleby's perverse
will takes the modest, even decorous, terms appropriate to the rationalized decency of the attorney. The
scrivener provides the completing rage to the attorney's prudence, the covert rebellion that enlarges the
attorney's conviction that "the easiest way of life is the best," the assertion of human choice as against
repressed "assumptions," and the forlorn pessimism to balance American optimism.
More ornately, we can read the "doubling" as a grotesque version of the Faust theme, of the duality of
consciousness in which only the spirit of negation continues the human striving. The image of the everresistant clerk completes the human fullness of the ever-adapting attorney. For we must realize that the
attorney literally demands his pairing with Bartleby. Though on the surface horrified by his clerk's defiance, he
suddenly acknowledges: "I burned to be rebelled against again." The demon of denial becomes necessary for
every man's existence.
Early in the story the attorney becomes the victim of his victim, reversing roles to read his own copy, slinking
away from his own door threatened in his own deepest faith. Yet he cannot stop from trying to fit Bartleby into
his narrowly calculated and walled-in conventions. At one point he becomes convinced that Bartleby must be
"demented"; as if to confirm this judgment, Bartleby altogether gives up the copying which provided, until then,
the rationale for keeping on the otherwise insubordinate clerk. Of Bartleby's new refusal, the attorney
righteously demands: "And what is the reason?" Bartleby cooly replies, "Do you not see the reason for
yourself?" None is self-evident but, with comic alacrity, the narrator "instantly" comes up with a reason to
justify the fantastic behavior of the figure he just previously denounced as demented. He kindly decides to
assume that Bartleby must have "temporarily impaired his vision" by his copy work. (Melville, the biographers
tell us, had trouble with his own eyesight during his writing, but to turn from the character to the author here
would be to confuse the meaning of an image with its possible source. ) The attorney's reason for Bartleby's
defiance comes as kindly and logical; it is also totally unsupported by any fact or assertion and appears
particularly gratuitous at that moment. The decent rationalist will have an assumption that properly explains
away otherwise rebellious behavior, no matter what.
However, shortly later the attorney asks Bartleby to do something not at all dependent on his eyes. The
scrivener still refuses. Then the narrator hopefully poses to Bartleby the possibility of his doing copying
sometime in the indefinite future when his eyes should be normal. Bartleby, totally ignoring the narrator's
proffered rationalization for his defiance, simply refuses for all time to copy. Another reason up, another reason
down; the perverse negation remains, and so does the gulf between the narrator's utilitarian reasoning and
Bartleby's defiant choosing.

Let us turn from the narrator's rationalism to his closely linked benevolence. Bartleby, like another midnineteenth century grotesque monologue about the irrational rebellion of a perverse clerk--Dostoyevsky's
Notes from Underground--mocks the great Enlightenment heritage of benevolence by way of rational selfinterest--a favorite American idealogy. Not only will private selfishness be inadequate to produce public good,
the whole psychology is insufficient. Dostoyevsky's clerk reveals that behavior is inexplicable and forlorn, and
therefore not to be comprehended by self-interest and benevolence.
Absolutist Bartleby, who asserts the freedom of the will but denies it any specific reasons or moral values,
lacks all selfishness. Repeatedly in the story the attorney triumphantly resorts to interest, to offers of money,
better employment, letters of recommendation, travel, a home, friendship--any selfish desire with which the
enlightened human might be manipulated--but Bartleby remains unamenable to the calculus of selfishness.
Here the attorney cannot discover, and exploit, the useful selfishness, as he does with his other scriveners. So
he prudently attempts to incorporate the perverse negations within his utilitarianism by the moral backdoor. As
long as Bartleby, however insubordinate, will copy, the attorney will bear with him and demonstrate his liberal
tolerance of the unfortunate, and thus "cheaply produce a delicious self-approval" of "conscience." Those
things beyond one's control can still serve for moral self-aggrandizement.
When Bartleby refuses even to copy anymore, the attorney attempts the balm of religion. He stays his rage
against Bartleby by recalling a parabolic situation. "I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and
the still more unfortunate Colt . . . and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently
permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into his fatal act." Melville here takes an
actual shocking New York murder of his time and uses it to comically expose his rationalizing attorney. Notice
how the narrator turns murderous rage to mere imprudence. This man has lost all sense of the passions of life.
The narrator adds a theological moral to his fable by remembering "the divine injunction: 'A new
commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another'" Here the Biblical drama of love to overcome sin
("this old Adam of resentment," in the attorney's reduction) comes out as clever Wall Street prudence.
Yes, this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and
prudent principle--a great safeguard to its possessor. . . . No man, that ever I heard of, ever committed a
diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should
especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy. At any rate, upon the
occasion in question, I strove to drown my exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by benevolently
construing his conduct. Poor fellow, poor fellow, thought I, he don't mean anything; and besides, he has seen
hard times, and ought to be indulged.
This passage provides a good example of Melville's crafty mockery: the revealing "prudent" again, the
moralistic self-congratulation, the pompousness of "benevolently construing," the patronizing assumption of
environmental causes ("hard times"), the contemptuous pity ("poor fellow, poor fellow . . . he don't mean
anything"), and the whole argument for making love and forgiveness into a sort of cheap insurance policy.
Goodness as "mere self-interest" reveals the obtuseness of such rationality and the brutality of such decency.
Yet something else has happened around the shoddy rationalizations and pseudo-morality of this solid citizen.
For in spite of his comfortable utilitarianism, he has become deeply involved with his perplexing scrivener:

"strange to say--I tore myself away from him whom I had so longed to be rid of." And though he has gotten
away, by moving his offices and letting Bartleby be hauled off to prison, he persists, with an odd mixture of
kindly and obscurely guilty concern, to visit Bartleby and offer him prudent charity. We need not rehearse all
his stratagems of bribes, appeals to self-interest and rationalized conventionality, to realize that, in their comic
excess, something else appears. For a secondary feeling develops in the narrator, ranging from his early
responses to Bartleby as the most "forlorn of humanity," through the intermittent recognition of a "common"
humanity with him, to a larger sense of significant suffering.
In his visits to Bartleby in prison, the attorney finds him both more adamant and more accusing than ever. He
refuses to eat, to change, to ameliorate his forlornness--not to prefer not to. Staring at yet more walls, Bartleby
says to that man who comfortably accepts the walled-in life: "I know you . . . and I want nothing to say to you."
Deeply moved by such solitary resistance, the narrator feels Bartleby to be some sacrificial figure amongst the
thieves and murderers. At Bartleby's final denial, lying in lonely death amidst the Egyptian masonry, the
narrator pronounces the final epitaph: Bartleby sleeps, he says, "With kings and counsellors." The phrase
probably comes from Job's rebellious curses (3.14) of an unjust and inexplicable cosmos. With such
heightening of the defiant scrivener, the majesty of negation and the wisdom of defeat become unmistakable
to the narrator and the reader.
We must consider again the final fervent paragraph about Bartleby having once worked in the Dead Letter
office. Some astute readers find it to be badly anticlimactic. It once more "explains away" Bartleby as the
victim of "hard times" and sad fortune, and so charitably patronizes him in memory. And the final eulogistic
line, universalizing the moral of forlornness, suggests high Victorian sentiment: "Ah, Bartleby: Ah, Humanity:"
(A famous contemporary American novelist once told me he had written a similar novella but had avoided
Melville's "mistake" of forgetting his ironic tone and making a sentimental generality.) Surely there has been
some preparation for the concluding line in the narrator's increasingly impassioned view of Bartleby, in spite of
his comfortable and utilitarian ideology. The humanistic beatification of Bartleby, forlorn saint of defiance, does
not violate our cumulative sense of the image. And "humanity" in that last line must have a similar significance
to what Melville, a believer in the profundity of defeat rather than the American dream of success, wrote in
another story: "Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laureled victor, but in this vanquished
one."
But we must also remember that the final sentiments are spoken by the attorney-narrator. Bartleby and, by the
attorney's own extension, humanity, appear to his walled-in awareness as enigmatic defiance and as defeat of
his comfortable doctrine. Though he has detected awesome and awful significance in his demon, he remains
the defender of American utility and optimism. The attorney's final statement, therefore, still ironically marks
his moralizing and rationalizing failure to understand Bartleby, a last sentimental gesture of the representative
American confronted with the violation of his faith.
Are we to take the narrator's preceding discussion as sentimentality or as irony? As the attorney imagines
Bartleby in the Dead Letter office--"from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring--the finger it was
meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave"--he is being maudlin. He is also trying to explain Bartleby as a
victim of his environment, which must miss the point. This continues the kindly incomprehension of the
attorney earlier in the story and his dubious tactics for salving his conscience, with the indulgence in

sentimentality obscuring any deeper insight and response. Taken literally, the Dead Letter office explains
away, rather than explains, Bartleby's refusal of the narrator's dead-wall life and values.
The ending of Bartleby can be read as sentimental, though it then becomes a failure in the story. It can, more
appropriately to the argument of the novella as a whole, be read as Melville's final mockery of bland
consciousness. Perhaps we should allow for some of both. Melville, self-made and self-doubting critic of our
benevolent rationalism and faith in comfortable and optimistic manipulation, may both perceive ambiguities
here and falter in them. Therefore the end may be sentimentally bad but may also serve the story as a final
ironic point. Certainly the mythographer who demonically created a whale as large as God did not make the
absurdly sainted Bartleby as primarily an image of bathos, or self-pity, though some may insinuate itself. For,
most importantly, Bartleby tells a story of passive resistance, with the emphasis on resistance. It is the
confession of a decent, prudent, rational, liberal man who finds in his chambers of consciousness the
incomprehensible, perverse, irrational demon of denial, and of his own denied humanity. The attorney
attempts to exorcise that rebellious and infuriating image with common sense, authority, utility, legalism,
theology, prudence, charity, resignation, causality, flight, religion and, at the end, sentimental reverence. But
the melancholy enigma, and the dead walls and letters of incomprehension, remain. The benevolent rationalist
in Melville's mocking fable never really confronts the meaning of Bartleby, never changes his view and way of
life.
The modest demon of irrational and defiant will, he who endlessly "prefers not to" accept the normative
conditions of the society, questions all of the civilized pretenses and their law and order. And it is the narrator,
not Bartleby, with his rationalizing assumptions and fantastically twisted prudent "goodness," who ends as the
pathetically absurd figure. The attempt to force benevolent rationalism up against the realities of our forlorn
and walled-in common humanity provides the larger purpose of the tale.
Melville appropriately appeals to our contemporary existentialist thinkers because of his reasoned exploration
of the irrational situation of man, the insistence on the defining solitude and absurdity and nothingness we
must face if we are to achieve authentic awareness. He exalts the perversely human in an amusingly sad
demand for a heroic humanity in a grotesque universe. The sardonic style of Bartleby's "I prefer not to"
continues to suggest an appropriate resistance to much of the world, and to the rationalizations, in which we
reside.
SAN DIEGO STATE COLLEGE
NOTES
1. I have discussed representative examples of the scholarly criticism in the notes to an earlier essay on
Melville--see my The Literary Rebel (Carbondale, Ill., 1965), Ch. IV--and so will not repeat them here. My
reconsideration focuses primarily on the interpretive problems rather than the commentaries. A recent list of
studies may be found in Bartleby the Scrivener, "A Melville Symposium," ed. Howard P. Vincent (Kent, Ohio,
1966), which also contains many examples of the obtuse whimsy that dominates the critical history. My brief
comparisons with Melville's other short fictions partly depend on the analyses in my "The Perplexity of
Melville's Benito Cereno," Studies in Short Fiction, VII (Spring 1968); and "The Perplexity of Melville's Billy
Budd," Novel: Forum on Fiction, II (Winter 1968).

*Studies in the Novel, vol. 1, number 4 (Winter 1969). Copyright by North Texas State University in 1969.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.