Essay #2 Draft

No pictures or links this time, mates, just an essay for you to pick apart!  Be gentle!  Oh, and I didn't put it in the correct format, since I'm just looking for content feedback.

James

A Tragic Hero

               Bartleby, the main character in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener:  A Story of Wall-Street, can best be understood as a tragic, melancholy hero, an unhappy representative of the vast masses of workers that live and die within the enormously hectic and impersonal industrialized society that the western world has embraced.  Bartleby is a victim, both of his own unknown inner torments and the meaninglessness of his pedantic tasks.  Without any personal ties to family or friends, and weighed down by depression and the insignificance of his work, he eventually allows himself to drift away into oblivion, forsaking and forsaken by modern society.

               Melville is very clear about the humdrum and unglamorous nature of a scrivener’s work.  As early as the first paragraph of the story he remarks about the nondescript nature of law-copyists or scriveners, “of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written” (Melville, para 1), an insinuation that there is remarkably little interest in scriveners beyond their employment circle.  The dreary, monotonous work is an underlying theme throughout the story, but it is never truly discussed, just illustrated with a few instances of Bartleby’s unique refusal to perform the tasks.  Indeed, Melville spends more time describing the narrator’s three employees than he spends discussing the nature of a scrivener’s work!

               The office itself contributes mightily to the lackluster atmosphere that is Bartleby’s last home and workplace.  Amid the busy scribbling of pen on parchment, one was spared any view at all that might allow the mind to wander into more beautiful landscapes.  As Melville notes, in one direction the windows “looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft” (Melville, para 5), while the other windows “commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade” (Melville, para 5).  There was literally nothing beyond the work, a monotonous, tedious sort of work that plodded on and on into the future.  The office was a cave, uninviting but suitable for a scrivener’s purposes.

               Bartleby himself contributes to this lifeless morass with his own actions, huddling behind his high green folding screen and withdrawing completely from his coworkers and his employer.  In fact, beyond his repeated refusals, there isn’t any interaction at all, much to the surprise and concern of the narrator.  Melville describes Bartleby’s location behind the screen as his “hermitage,” an eloquent way of portraying Bartleby’s self-imposed isolation.  This voluntary seclusion increased in scope, as Bartleby continued to refuse tasks, until finally Bartleby refused to do the work at all.  He was withdrawing, turning inward to escape the cold bureaucratic world around him.  This departure didn’t go unnoticed by the narrator, but he was a product of the same system that Bartleby wished to leave, and he could not find a way in his limited vision of reaching Bartleby and bringing him back into the fold.

               In the final paragraph, Melville gives a profound and insightful hint into the unraveling of Bartleby’s soul:

The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive 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? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.  (Melville, para 250)

In effect, Melville is illustrating quite clearly to the reader that Bartleby’s mental collapse had begun prior to his engagement at the narrator’s office, in an employment that had tested his will.  It was monotonous, dreary, and unfulfilling work with little human contact, tossing hopes and dreams into fires to be consumed and forgotten.  Humanity was secondary to the job, and the unending bleakness of his tasks stretched to the life’s horizon, a daily grind that tore into his soul and deadened his heart.  Bartleby’s work as a scrivener didn’t improve his wounded condition, but rather contributed to his deterioration with its own repetitive and uninteresting tasks, until it had finally crushed his will to live beneath the uncaring gears of modern industrialized society.

Melville evidently wanted the reader to initially marvel at Bartleby’s eccentricities, and then feel the utmost sympathy for the deep depression clearly gripping the pale scrivener.  Finally, the reader is invited to share in the narrator’s sadness for the departed soul of Bartleby, a victim of an indifferent but bustling society that doesn’t seem to have the time for human kindness.  Bartleby is a tragic hero, an iconic figure for the workers of modern society, lost within the bureaucratic nightmare and doomed to a lifetime of plodding, obscure, and meaningless work.  His final act is a testament to his unwillingness to participate any further.  If the narrator had been able to engage Bartleby in one final conversation, it might have been thus:

               “Bartleby, you must live.  You must!”

               “I would prefer not to.”