Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (The Art of the Novella… (original 1853; edition 2004)

This short story by Herman Melville, arguably one of the greatest authors the United States has ever produced, follows the downward trajectory of Bartleby, a strange and pale young clerk in a nineteenth-century New York law firm. Narrated by Bartleby's erstwhile employer, it records his gradual withdrawal into himself, to the point of self-destruction. Simultaneously hilarious and tragic, it has that uniquely surreal quality which is the hallmark of Melville's great works.

It is in relation to these other works that this story can best be understood, and some of Melville's great themes be appreciated. As another reviewer remarked, the story takes a very critical view of capitalism, and its effect on the soul of the wage worker. Bartleby's slide into the "blankness of extinction" (the title of a paper I wrote on this story), is precipitated in no small part by the spirit-quenching nature of his work. That Melville's critique was intentional, can be demonstrated by his similar treatment of another group of wage workers in his short story, The Tartarus of Maids.

But I think it would be a mistake to think that Melville's criticism is aimed at capitalism, in and of itself. I had a professor who always argued that one of Melville's most pervasive themes was the destructive nature of the father-son bond - the ways in which fathers destroy their sons. This is strongly evident in another of Melville's shorter works, Billy Budd, which has many parallels to Bartleby. In this sense, I believe that although Melville is critical of capitalism, he sees the employer-employee relationship as a stand-in for pre-existing destructive patterns.

Finally, Bartleby can also be understood as an oppositional companion-piece to that continuously avant-garde masterpiece, The Confidence-Man, in which Melville seeks to work out his feelings about the limitations of communication itself. To speak is to deceive in this novel, and the author contends that everyone is both a con-man and dupe, all at once. To seek to escape from this cycle of deception, made inevitable by the very nature of speech, is to reject one's humanity, and to self-abnegate. More to the point, it can't be done. In this schema, Bartleby's absolutist stance in refusing to "play the game" must lead to self-destruction.

I love this story. I can think of no other work that has so moved me to laughter, even while I cried. It is a very potent distillation of Melville's genius, bitter but brilliant. Thank goodness it's a short story! I was very happy to find this edition, which presents the story by itself, in a very handsome cloth edition. It also includes black & white photographs from the lower Manhattan of Melville's day.

Let me close my review of this brilliant work with a short personal vignette. Some years ago, while going to college and working in a bookstore, I mentioned to one of my co-workers that I was going to be taking a class on Herman Melville. He was a plumber by trade, but was holding down this job so his disabled son could have regular health insurance. When I told him about my class, he asked if we would be reading the story Bartleby the Scrivener, to which I responded that I believed we would be. "Well," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "I could tell you all about that story, but I'd prefer not to," and he would say nothing more on the topic. A very well-read man, he liked to take some of the English graduate students we had working there down a peg or two, and knowing him was a welcome reminder that formal education and true intelligence are not synonymous. So, Steve, wherever you are, here's to you! ( )

I love Bartleby. And I think that's because I will never really understand him. ( )

Recommended by Ben Apatoff

Il più famoso "preferirei di no" della letteratura.

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The most famous "I prefer not to" of literature. ( )

I honestly don't know what to say about this. It was engaging and I liked it. I think to get deeper I'd have to write perhaps another thousand or so words. It makes me greatly look forward to more of this author! ( )