Bartleby the Scrivener

The narrator lives Melville his voice to set the tone of the story, and it is through this tone that the THEME is established: that for some men the only way the can cope with the world is to retreat from it, to create their own reality. It is Melville's view that ultimately this will lead to non-exist-ence, but through the narrator he comes to understand (to a degree) the personality that Bartleby has that makes him go on sabbatical from life.

"In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now--pallidly neat,

pitiably respectable, and incurably forlorn! It was Bartlely" (Melville 11). With three adjectives Melville has given the reader the essence of Bartleby the man. The narrator is impressed with the fact that initially Bartleby is an employee who attends to his work with clockwork precision.

Without any apparent motivation, Bartleby takes on a new attitude. He "prefers not to" do certain work for the boss. What intrigues the narrator is the way

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rroundings that he is familiar with, Bartleby starts to withdraw even more into himself. This means that he stops eating, and he launches into this phase of his life with the same tone and manner that he has dealt with the rest of his endeavors. "'I prefer not to dine to-day,' said Bartleby, turning away. It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinner'" (Melville 44). The narrator has already had his suspicions, but at this point he turns to the grub-man and says "I think he is a little deranged" (Melville 45). Without nourishment, it is not long before Bartleby dies. Ironically, the narrator finds out that he had once been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. "Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?" (Melville 46) Bartleby leaves his impression of the bureaucrat who takes passivity to the ultimate test. Possibly his job in the Dead Letter office trained him for a way of dealing with life on such a low-key level that it was only natural that he fade into the woodwork and on to death as a matter of course. Throughout the story, set on Wall Street, Melville gives the reader the images of walls. A wall can confine an individual, "wall him off" from life and alienate him from experience. A wall ca
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Approximate Word count = 1393
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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