Literary Analysis of Bartleby the Scrivener Essay

Bartleby the Scrivener could be described as a story about nourishting relinquish of its title character, about the cashiers attempt to get rid of Bartleby, and Bartlebys tenacious capacity to be always there. It is the story of an unnamed attorney and his employee, Bartleby, a scribbler of law documents.Confronted not only with Bartlebys refusal to do work (first to read copies against the original, then to copy altogether), merely also with the contagious constitution of the particular enounces of his refusal (Bartlebys peculiar I would prefer not to), the cashier concludes that, before Bartleby turns the tongues any further of those with whom he comes into contact, he must get rid of Bartleby. At the same time Bartleby feels mobbed in his privacy (27) when the different magnate workers crowd him behind his penetrate, they in turn are invaded by his idiosyncrasy his private idiom prefer. Bartlebys presence breaks down the clear distinctions between public and private, professional and domestic, between privacy and the mob. By pinpointing Bartleby as the cause of infective language (language turned bad), the narrator wants to stop the course of a process (the turning of tongues) already in progress. But getting rid of Bartleby is as silklike as getting rid of a chronic condition the narrator emphasizes a phrase which appears textually in italics he was always there (20). Bartleby is, as the narrator calls him, a nuisance (40), an intolerable incubus. As a character in the story with a body, he moves very little, but the few formulates he tells break out at unexpected moments in the office. Every attempt the narrator makes to control the passive Bartleby and his infectious language fails hilariously (Schehr 97). The narrator experiences a curious tension between the impossible imperative (on the level of the story) to get rid of the subject, and the impossibility (on the level of the narration) to write his complete biography (Bartlebys news r eport). Thus, Bartleby is also a fable about piece of music history or biography.In attempting to write what he thinks of as Bartlebys biography, the narrator merely misnames his writing project, or he emphasizes it from the wrong point of view. In search of Bartlebys origins, the narrator does not simply narrate (as he thinks) the history of Bartleby the Scrivener he relates instead the story of his own worry vis-a-vis Bartleby. In particular, he relates his anxiety over the scriveners silence and modes of breaking that silence for we could declare that, rather than expressing very little or in particular ways, Bartleby has particular ways of occasionally breaking silence.It is this violence in actors line, this unexpected eruption, which the narrator fears. The narrator, whose acquaintances describe him as an eminently safe patch, who likes nothing better than the cool tranquility of a snug retreat (4), is thrown decidedly off kilter when faced with what he terms Bartleby s passive resistance (17). Bartlebys weapon is his total indifference to truth, whereas the narrator seeks a second opinion on truth from the other office mates. Bartleby could be seen as the single solid block around which the narrator writes his own story about truth rather than the truth about the Bartleby story.Bartlebys passive resistance in reality generates the story confronted with it, the narrator creates theories (his doctrine of self-reliances, for instance), carries on debates with himself, and seeks the counsel of others all with the opaque Bartleby as the core. In reconstructing Bartlebys story, the narrator follows an implicit logic which he never directly states. It is the logic of cause and effect. (He is not deliberately hiding this logic, but because he takes its harshness for granted, he never comments on it critically.) Believing in the possibility of finding a specific, locatable, and nameable cause to Bartlebys condition (as he is able to do with the oth er office workers, Nippers and Turkey, whose moods vary according to their diets and the time of day), the narrator thinks that by eradicating the cause of the problem, he can alter the effects, the effects of Bartlebys speaking condition in the office space. McCall follows the same logic as the narrator in seeking causes of Bartlebys behavior.He mentions remark that when the narrator asks Bartleby to run an errand for him at the post office, that is belike the last place, if the rumor is correct, that Bartleby would ever want to go. (McCall 129). The narrator never considers that his line of reasoning might be faulty that Bartlebys condition may not be linked to a specific, locatable, nameable cause. We as readers may be placed in the same position as the narrator in that we never have it away either the origin of Bartlebys condition we witness primarily its effects, or symptoms, in the story.These symptoms reside not only in Bartleby as individual character, but in the very wa y the narrator tells the story about that character. Rather than speaking about the cause of Bartlebys condition, one could much aptly speak about the ways in which its effects are spread to other characters within the text. When the narrator impatiently summons Bartleby to join and help the others in the scenario of conclave reading, Bartleby responds, I would prefer not to (14). Hearing this response the narrator turns into a pillar of salt (14).(Faced with Bartlebys responses and sheer presence, the narrator oftentimes evokes images of his losing, then vigilant to, consciousness. ) When he recovers his senses, he tries to reason with Bartleby, who in the meantime has retreated behind his screen. The narrator says These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor deliver to you, because one examination lead answer for your four papers. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer (15)The narrator i s exasperated when Bartleby does not respond immediately to the logic behind his work ethic. These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to you. Examining or reading copy is a money saving activity, from which every member of the office profits (four documents for the price of one reading ). Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. To the contract the lawyer emphatically de gentlemans gentlemands from his employee, a bond based on an exchange of reading, Bartleby replies three times, gently, in a flutelike tone, I (would) prefer not to (15).By refusing to read copy, Bartleby refuses to consent to the economy of the office. It is perhaps only to another type of reading, one not based on a system of exchange and profit, which Bartleby consents. Although the narrator says he has never seen Bartleby reading not even a newspaper (24) he does often notice him staring extracurricular the window of the office onto a brick wall. Staring at the dead bric k wall (in what the narrator calls Bartlebys dead-wall reveries) may be Bartlebys only form of reading, winning the place of the economy-based reading demanded of him in the process of verifying copies.About halfway through the story, the lawyer/narrator visits his office on a Sunday dawn and, discovering a blanket, soap and towel, a few crumbs of ginger nuts and a morsel of cheese, deduces that the scrivener never leaves the office. Realizing the full impact of Bartlebys condition, he states, What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. (25) The narrator clearly locates the disorder in Bartleby. Seeing himself in the role of diagnostician and healer, he himself is faced with the hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill (24).The narrators concern about an individual medical cure should more aptly be a concern about an obsessively private rhetorical debate or a dangerously idiomatic group contagious disease (Pe rry 409). Despite his assumption that Bartleby is incurable, or perhaps precisely because he can effect no cure, the narrator beleaguers himself throughout the story with questions or commands to do something about Bartleby (McCall 9). If the private mans disorder can be passed on to another (one) person, what happens when the condition is let loose out of close quarantine into the public space of the office?Bartleby walks a precarious tightrope between comedy and tragedy (Inge 25). The tragic dimension often resides in the narrators turning inward on himself (a form of tragic compression), then putting himself on trial, an interior moment of accusation which eventually results in the collapse of the narrative in a single suspire or exclamation (Ah, Bartleby Ah, humanity 46). The comic effects are often related to the authoritarian attempt (and failure) to contain the spread of idiom as infection (Perry 412).If Bartleby has been a figure for tragedy in the lone meditation of the narrator, he becomes a figure for comedy in his contact with his office mates Nippers and Turkey. The more the narrator tries to regulate the contact between the three, the more hilarious and significantly out of control is Bartlebys influence. The effort to contain or control tends actually to promote the epidemic proportions of the narrative. It is the narrator himself who uses a vocabulary of contagion in relation to Bartleby. He says he has had more than ordinary contact (3) with other scriveners he has k immediatelyn.Bartleby exceeds this already extraordinary contact he has been touched by handling dead letters (Schehr 99). Some critics reproduce the narrators language of contagion in talking about Bartleby. McCall, in his study on The Silence of Bartleby, describes our response, the collective readers response, to reading the tale As we go through the story, we watch with a certain delight how Bartleby is catching. We root for the spread of the bug. (145) In a somewhat l ess delighted vein, Borges says, Bartlebys frank nihilism contaminates his companions and even the stolid man who tells Bartlebys story. (Borges 8) In the office scenes where the employees and boss come inevitably together, the bug word is Bartlebys prefer. Nippers uses it mockingly against the narrator as a transitive action verb when he overhears Bartlebys words of refusal to the narrators plea to be a little reasonable. Bartleby echoes, At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable (26). If Nippers is suffering from his own peculiar and chronic condition of indigestion, he takes on the symptoms of Bartlebys condition when he exclaims to the narrator, Prefer not, eh? Id prefer him, if I were you sir, Id prefer him Id give him preferences, the stubborn mule What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now? (26) Whereas later in the story the narrator totally loses his critical skill to catch himself in his speech, in this exchange he is still able to suppose the e ffect Bartlebys word is having on him. He notes anxiously, Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word prefer upon all sorts of not exactly fitted occasions. (27) It is this qualifier not exactly which is of particular interest.Bartlebys use of words is not exactly wrong. Prefer is so insidious because it is only slightly askew, dislocated, idiosyncratic. As McCall accurately notes about the power of Bartlebys I prefer not to, one must hear, in the little silence that follows it, how the line delivers two remote meanings, obstinacy and politeness. (152) The line calls just enough attention to itself so as to attract others to its profoundly mixed message (its perfect yes and no) in an echoic way (McCall 152). Prefer is as inobtrusive, as contagious, and as revolutionary as a sneeze.The narrator lets it out of his mouth involuntarily. When Turkey enters the scene and uses the bug word without realizing it (without Nippers italicized parody or the narra tors critical comments), the narrator says to him, in a slightly excited tone, So you have got the word, too (27). In this diametrical sentence, the verb get implies to receive (as in to receive a word or message), but more strikingly for our discussion here, it implies the verb to catch one catches the word as one would catch a cold.The narrator attempts to monitor the contagion by naming the bug and pointing it out to the others. But the word mocks everyones will to control it prefer pops up six times in the next half a page four times unconsciously in the speech of one of the employees, and twice consciously (modified by word) in the narration of the lawyer. Bartleby could be described as a story of the intimacy or anxiety a lawyer feels for the law-copyist he employs. The narrator arranges a screen in the corner of his office behind which Bartleby may work.Pleased with the arrangement of placing Bartleby behind the screen in near proximity to his own desk, the narrator stat es, Thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined (12). The narrator idealizes the possibility of a perfect unity between privacy and community in the work environment, but it is precisely the conflict between these two spatial conditions which generates the story, defining not only Bartlebys idiocy, but the narrators as well.The narrator most characteristically encounters Bartleby emerging from his retreat (13) or retiring into his hermitage (26). The screen isolates Bartleby from the view of the narrator, but not from his voice. Works Cited Borges, Jorge Luis. Prologue to Herman Melvilles Bartleby in Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Other Tales, ed. Harold Bloom. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1987 Inge, Thomas M. , ed.Bartleby the Inscrutable. Hamden, CT Archon Books, 1979. McCall, Dan. The Silence of Bartleby. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1989. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York Penguin Books, 1986. Pe rry, Dennis R. Ah, humans Compulsion Neuroses in Melvilles Bartleby. Studies in Short Fiction 23. 4 (fall 1987) 407-415. Schehr, Lawrence R. Dead Letters Theories of Writing in Bartleby the Scrivener Enclitic vii. l (spring 1983) 96-103.