Melville Herman Melville's Short Story "Bartleby the Essay

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Melville

Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" describes the drudgery of daily life in an office. The reader learns about the title scrivener from a well-meaning, good-natured lawyer who hires Bartleby to help in the office alongside his relatively ineffective scribes Nippers and Turkey. At first, Bartleby seems a good fit in spite of his dour demeanor. As time passes, Bartleby loses all motivation to work. He starts to refuse to work completely, as he sinks deeper and deeper into a depression. The narrator reaches out to Bartleby but only in superficial ways, never managing to penetrate the real underlying reasons for Bartleby's funk. Bartleby's death sparks in the narrator a deep sympathy for the plight of humanity. He calls out for "hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities."

With the story of Bartleby the scrivener, Melville addresses a broad range of issues related to the universal human condition. The story is not autobiographical, although there may be some elements and characters to which Melville personally related.

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To the title character, Melville can relate to the budding sense of futility in the act of writing. As a scrivener, Bartleby does represent the act of writing by rote rather than from a place of creative power. Melville did not work as a scrivener; yet he did struggle with the various ways of expressing his literary talents. He was a failed poet, and Melville also received very little actual recognition for his written work during his lifetime. Moby Dick, for example, "brought its author neither acclaim nor reward," ("Melville, Herman," n.d.).

It is entirely possible that Bartleby represents Melville's deepest fears. He sees in Bartleby a person who has become so utterly dejected that he loses even the will to stay alive. Bartleby is suicidal, although he lacks the motivation even to kill himself. Instead, he simply stops eating. Without the will to eat, he dies of starvation….....

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