The story simultaneously supports our tendency to identify with the narrator and to judge him for not acting more forcefully towards his workers.Īs such, it works to make us feel, uncomfortably, our own complicity with the forces of market capitalism. The most dominant strain in recent academic criticism, however, has foregrounded the context of antebellum capitalism in contending that the story seeks to demonstrate how the narrator, despite his apparent forbearanceĪnd sympathy, remains entrapped in an economic logic that precludes his sympathy having any real effect. While many readers become frustrated with his willingness to put up with the poor working habits of his employees, some admire his sympathy for a man who, to a largeĮxtent, refuses that sympathy. Has been expended on judging the narrator and the story's judgment of his behavior. Other readers have emphasized Bartleby as a figure of inscrutability, of the nature of language or existence itself as finally open to interpretation in a way that cannot ever be fully settled. At the center of the story is the narrator's – and the reader's – attempt to make sense of Bartleby.Ĭritics have suggested a number of ways to read the character – as a Christ-like figure (the narrator's Peter-like refusal of Bartleby three times towards the close), as a stand-in for a kind of Thoreauvian nonviolent resistance, as a figure of theĪlienated artist (Bartleby is paid to write monotonous tracts Melville felt trapped by a literary marketplace that would not accept what he wanted to write) as a representative of the exploited working classes of the antebellum era as an existentialistĬomment on the utter meaninglessness of life. Like "Benito Cereno", "Bartleby" first appeared in Putnam's Magazine (in 1853) and later in the collection The Piazza Tales (1856). Scrivener" remains one of Melville's most famous shorter works, a story that has been understood through a variety of frames, some focusing on the narrator, others on Bartleby, and some on the context, which the subtitle emphasizes: "A Story of Wall-Street". Along with "Benito Cereno" and the posthumously published Billy Budd, "Bartleby, the Of sympathy, the opacity of other humans, and the way antebellum social conditions exacerbated questions concerning the spiritual equality of humankind. Like some of the other stories he published following the critical and popular failure of his novel Pierre (1852), Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is an enigmatic, philosophically rich tale concerning, among other things, the nature
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