Literary Analysis---Bartleby

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street was a very interesting read. Paragraph 53 said a lot to me. “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance… Poor fellow! Thought I, he means no mischief… his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But… The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap.”(Par.53)

            I’ll digress a little and say that the author first gave a brief description of him and admitted to being lazy, “an unambitious lawyer” which is kind of an oxymoron because it takes a lot of work to become a lawyer. I’m off on a tangent I know. He then goes into in- depth detail of the other 3 employees and how they irritate him. Then there is Bartleby, he is a diligent worker whose quality of work is profound, but he shows no emotion, “prefers not to” when asked to do something, is quite literally an office hermit and, to use a contemporary term, is not a team player. This brings us to paragraph 53.

            The lawyer has become obsessed with Bartleby, he cannot figure him out. His other employees have their idiosyncrasies that he has learned to deal with, they are somehow acceptable. “If you like someone they can eat with their fingers but, if you don’t (like them) how they hold their fork pisses you off.” This also says something about society in general, we have been conditioned to accept people’s negative characteristics when they react in a “normal” way but when someone reacts differently we label them “abnormal” and there must be something wrong with them. It is evident that the lawyer is aware of this because he takes pity on the man albeit for selfish reasons at this point. As the story progresses the lawyers moral struggle continues to grow. His pity turns to empathy and now people are questioning why he (the lawyer) is reacting abnormally. “You should be kicking Bartleby out.” was the universal reaction, not only to his refusing to work, but also refusing to leave the office.   This has the lawyer questioning even his own manhood.

            I have gone outside the context of my paragraph, I know, I could go on. I’ll finish by saying that the lawyer actually developed a compassion for Bartleby, no matter how much he tried to remove himself from him, and had a genuine concern. This is evident in the 53^rd paragraph also when the lawyer states, “If I turn him away he will fall into a less indulgent employer…driven forth miserably to starve.” Which in the end was his demise.

            Who is Bartleby? I would say, “Anyone in our lives that doesn’t fit.” They deserve to be embraced, not discarded.
Work Cited:
 Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street." Bartleby. N.p., 2011. Web. 16 Feb 2012. <http://www.bartleby.com/129/>.