Like much of Melville’s work, “Bartleby” is a story that reveals as much by what is absent as by what is present. From beginning to end, “Bartleby” illustrates the way a culture and society can harm an individual’s capacity to be grateful and the way an individual can crush this capacity in himself.
The story is told from the point of view of an elderly lawyer living in mid-18th-century New York City. Until he employs Bartleby, he’s sought and lived a comfortable life. As the workload in his office is growing, he decides to hire another scrivener. (A “scrivener” is someone who copies by hand for a living.) This job was common in the days before photocopy machines. In the first few days on the job, Bartleby is a marvelous employee, copying text at a prodigious rate. But he progressively becomes an irritation, an obsession, and a symbol for the lawyer.
The essence of this progression is Bartleby’s characteristic words: “I prefer not to.”
With these words, Bartleby first refuses to perform professional and secretarial tasks generally associated with his job. Then, he begins to live in the office. He soon refuses to do any work at all. The lawyer bends over backward, trying anything to coax some acquiescence, some work from Bartleby. He fires Bartleby, but he is too tenderhearted to evict him when Bartleby makes no effort to leave. Finally, he moves his practice to another office, but it is too late to escape Bartleby. The lawyer continues to try helping his former employee, even after Bartleby is evicted by the new tenant, sent to prison as a vagrant, and finally, dies because he refuses to eat.
The Story’s Greater Meaning
There is an eerie echo in this story of a famous Bible story, which Melville read repeatedly and carefully. It is the parable of the Last Judgment, in chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew. In this parable, Christ grants people entrance into heaven on the basis of basic charity: giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, hospitality to strangers, clothes to the naked, comfort to the sick and imprisoned. Christ states that he will consider this elemental charity to be charity toward himself: “As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)
The narrator literally attempts each of these acts. Thinking only of Bartleby, he tries to perform the essential righteous deeds. Yet regardless of his good intentions, he fails to accomplish them because Bartleby rejects each attempt. If the standard of entry into heaven is goodness, Bartleby is, as far as it depends on himself, frustrating his fellow man in his reach for heaven. Furthermore, since thanks is the appropriate response to goodness offered, Bartleby’s “prefer not to” responses are not only rejections of goodness but also direct refusals of gratitude.
Bartleby rejects companionship, pity, and sympathy. He “prefers not to” acknowledge that life is good while he stares through a window that opens on to a dead wall. He will not acknowledge that freedom is good, choosing to be taken to prison. Finally, he will not even acknowledge that life is good, wasting away with food available to sustain him.
His actions are exactly the opposite of gratitude. Robert Emmons, a professor of clinical psychology, known as an expert on the scientific study of gratitude, defines it as: “The recognition that life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift.” For Bartleby, life can’t give enough, and nothing is good enough to be accepted as a gift.
In addressing this story, some scholars propose that Bartleby suffers from depression, and the text supports this idea: his single-minded competence in a prescribed skill set, his lack of enjoyment in life, and his ultimate withdrawal from life. However, depression, as witnessed by the many people who have wrestled with it and even overcome it, does remove all responsibility. A depressed person does not have to reject overtures of help and friendship at every turn. Even scholars who understand Bartleby as depressed, at the same time acknowledge his strange, strong will. In one influential article, English professors Daniel Stempel and Bruce Stillians noted Bartleby’s will, a will bent on “negation of values . . . [even] the value of existence itself.” And what is a negation of all value, but saying that “nothing is good enough”?
While Bartleby is ultimately responsible for his fate, the narrator hints at the factors that encouraged and enabled him to reject goodness. At the story’s beginning, the narrator, by his own description, reveals how self-satisfied his life is, or at least how satisfying his life was until he met Bartleby. He chose to pursue a legal career to obtain the most money with the least risk. He did a “snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds.” His lack of human ties, such as a wife, children, relatives, or close friends, suggests that he embraces a very small-minded self-sufficiency. This suggestion is all but proven when he indicates that he is “a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.” Unlike Bartleby, he does not reject life, but like Bartleby, he holds away from himself any possibilities of being thankful.
Melville hints that it is not just the narrator who is pursuing a life focused on self and thus devoid of gratitude. One indication is found in the story’s subtitle: “A Story of Wall-Street.” Business, for all its necessity and importance, can easily take on an outsized importance in life—to the exclusion of higher values.
The narrator’s worldview is partly the result of his surroundings. His one point of pride in relation to other people is that they consider him “safe.” As a symbol of a sterile kind of safety and a sealing off from meaningful relationships, he and his employees work in an office where the windows look only upon walls. Bartleby’s gradual rejection of all human contact takes place while he works in a cubicle facing such a “dead” wall.
These windows and walls raise an essential point. Windows allow us to see the view beyond the plane of glass, just as material goods allow us to see beyond to the people who provide them for us. Bartleby despairs because this deeper meaning has been sealed off by his environment. But complacent men are no better. They enjoy life’s gifts without looking past them to those they should be grateful to.
All of this is not to say that business is evil or that a system can take away one’s ultimate responsibility. Yet when one’s surroundings place too much emphasis on material security and comfort for its own sake, these can distract one from acknowledging others’ needs and from one’s own need for things greater than security and comfort.
One of the great qualities of Melville’s writing is that his characters are never simple caricatures. Readers learn from perverse characters as well as noble ones, and the noble ones always reveal flaws that are as instructive as their virtues. Bartleby, a villain insofar as he refuses to be grateful, is also a challenge to those who are too complacent to be grateful.
The narrator who attempts to save Bartleby becomes a better person in the attempt, as well as a wiser one, because he finally realizes that Bartleby’s vice is one that all people are prey to: ingratitude. His last four words, the words that end the story, are “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” Like Bartleby, all people have needs that they cannot fulfill by themselves. Like Bartleby, all people are tempted to be ungrateful, and in this way, reject goodness.
Most people don’t reject life like Bartleby does, but most, at least sometimes, accept his premise: Good things are not good enough to evoke gratitude. Bartleby’s extreme example is an admonition to fully acknowledge good things as good and then to be grateful for them.
