Bartleby The Scrivener, Deeply Symbolic

Bartleby the Scrivener, a Deeply Symbolic Work

"Bartleby the Scrivener," is one of the most complicated stories Melville has ever written, perhaps by any American writer of that period. It id a deep and symbolic work, its make you think of every little detail differently. It makes you realize that a little detail actually make a difference and give a meaning to the story analysis.

The walls are controlling symbols of the story; in fact some had said that it's a parable of walls. Melville tells us explicitly that certain prosaic facts are indispensable to understand a story (Leo Marx 1970). One of the walls, which is part of sky-light shaft, is white. And it provides the best light available, with the sky invisible. There is no direct rays from the sun penetrate the building. At the other end the wall is in an everlasting shade, and is black with age. As the narrator say, the walls have something in common: they are equally "deficient in what landscape painters call 'life'." "The difference in color is less important than the fact that what we see through each window is just a wall" (Marx). Those walls are the walls that Bartleby stared at for hours everyday. Is it the lifeless view he stared at that made his soul lifeless, the walls that made him give up on life?

"What ultimately killed this writer, was not the walls themselves, but the fact that he confused the walls built by men with the walls of human mortality" (Marx). Bartleby's confusion of stone with finitude argues Marx, shows the psychosis of a madman reduced the latter for the former (Timothy J. Deines).

The Bust of Cicero, a Roman orator, that is a few inches above the lawyers head in the office symbolizes Bartleby's lifeless life (sparknotes). Throughout my reading of the topic I saw that many commentators have compared Bartleby to a piece of office equipment like a scanner or a copy machine. Indeed, at some points in the story he does seem to be a mere office furnishing.

"I would prefer not to" Bartleby's trade mark phrase. Did this phrase really mean anything? Or was it there to bring confusion to the story, and raise more questions and add query? Some had interpreted his phrase as a scream for help, as if he is shouting "I am a human being, I can and will make choices concerning my own life." But when his preferences are completely ignored and he is sent to the city prison, he gives up on life and dies. It appeared to him as if he had lost the one element of humanity he seemed to possess. Others said that, his refusal of the lawyer's request has been read as a critique of the materialism of American culture that was growing at this time. Where it is pretty much significant in the story that the lawyer's office is on Wall Street and Wall Street was at that time becoming the hub of financial activity in the U.S. His refusal amounts to a heroic opposition to economic control. That shows how the theme of this story is extremely subtle, and that gives the story its popularity among readers allover the world.

The last paragraph can't be left without analysis; it's where a new mystery was revealed. It is the one thing the lawyer had discovered about Bartleby; the rumor that Bartleby once worked in the Dead Letter office, and was fired in an administrative shake-up. "Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? ... On errands of life, these letters speed to death..." The lawyer wonders whether it was the lonely depressing job, reading letters meant for people now gone or dead, which drove Bartleby into his final stillness beneath a prison-yard tree (litsum). The letters could also make a good metaphor for the drudgery of the emerging middle-class, blue collar job. Classifying the letters day in and day out could eventually be difficult for any human being to endure for a long time, and such repetitive tasks are even today a common source of melancholy, desperation and depression for some employees. By making them Dead Letters, Melville makes the depressing nature of such task more explicit (sparknotes).

Bartleby changes his job as if was willing to write letters