Tayo Amos

Mr. Smoot
Bartleby Essay
February 1, 2010

The Bartleby Enigma

Both the narrator of Bartleby and I have only one thing in common: Bartleby has

affected us in ways we both did not foresee. In our different occupations, he as a lawyer

and I as an English student, we can usually circumvent challenges or obstacles that

present themselves unexpectedly. If we encounter something or someone that annoys us

or disrupts our usual routines, we both adjust and work around those obstacles. Just like

the narrator learns to adjust to the eccentricities of his scriveners, I too learn to adjust to

eccentric protagonists in literary works. Yet, when we both met Bartleby, arriving

inconsequently in both the narrator’s office and my reading assignment, he refused to

acquiesce to our “natural expectancy of instant compliance” (10). Instead, Bartleby

remains a character that refuses to be defined in our world, as if warning us that we

would go crazy trying to figure him out. Therefore, I will end my obsession with Bartleby

and admit that he will always be an enigma.

I first attempt to categorize Bartleby as a transcendentalist, a person who

disregards societal norms and chooses to live a life of solitude. Like Bartleby,

transcendentalists, defined by Emerson in the 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalists”, “are

lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they

shun general society…” In his own life of voluntary solitude, Bartleby chooses to engage

with others minimally, an attitude that translates as “a certain unconscious air of pallid –

how shall I call it? – of pallid haughtiness” (18). By refusing to indulge in human

cravings such as company, a home, and eventually, food, Bartleby acts as if he is more

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superior to others because of his ability to transcend or surpass the limits of human

ability. While others try to help him, mostly the narrator, Bartleby cannot be helped

because “his soul I could not reach” (18). He is such an introvert and an outsider that

society gets annoyed to the point of exasperation. As if to feel better for their inability to

assist Bartleby, they must label him as “the victim of innate and incurable disorder” (18),

“the stubborn mule” (20), “deranged” (32), and, the most interesting of them all, “a

gentleman forger” (32).

Unfortunately, Bartleby does not say much to either confirm or eliminate this

possibility of being a transcendentalist. However, one does not need to hear a statement

from Bartleby to disregard Emerson’s description of transcendentalists, who “are not by

nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial…but joyous, susceptible, affectionate; they have

even more than others a great wish to be loved”. Assuming that the reader believes the

narrator’s point of view, Bartleby does not have any of these lovable qualities, nor does

he seem to want any love from others. Rather, he was “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable,

incurably forlorn” (9), who filled the ambience of the office with his “morbid moodiness”

(18). He also rejects any sort of assistance from the narrator who cares about him. Yet,

the narrator does have the ulterior motive to “cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval”

(13), and the narrator senses that Bartleby seems “ungrateful, considering the undeniable

good usage and indulgence he had received from me” (19). Perhaps then, Bartleby wants

to be truly loved and realizes then that the narrator can never truly love him.

By labeling Bartleby a transcendentalist, however, I also completely disregard the

narrator’s near obsession with Bartleby. The narrator “who, from his youth upwards, has

been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is best” (3), encounters

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Bartleby and the phrase “I prefer not to”. Because of the wording of the phrase, Bartleby

is not rebelling, but obviously, he is not submitting to authority either. Unlike the mood

swings and discrepancies of his other two scriveners, Bartleby’s preference to not follow

the narrator’s orders is unavoidable and unsolvable. He asks for advice because “in some

unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest

faith” (11), fumbling with the grey area Bartleby presents.

After the narrator regards Bartleby’s eccentricities as a “’passing whim’” (14), he

starts to dread Bartleby’s presence especially after he realizes that “I had got into the way

of involuntarily using this word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions.

And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously

affected me in a mental way” (20). He mistakes a conversation about an election as a bet

to whether or not Bartleby would stay in his office, imagining “that all Broadway shared

in my excitement, and were debating the same question with me” (23). Yet, whenever the

narrator is close to firing Bartleby, he finds some reason not to, thus complicating the

situation even further. The longer Bartleby stays in the office, the more he seems “a

fixture in my chamber” (21), almost as if he were a threatening parasite. Since firing him

(how immoral!), reporting him to the police (how unreasonable!), and keeping him in the

office (how useless!) were not viable options, he decides to run away from the problem,

only to discover that Bartleby comes back, a problem more consistent than before. Again,

he tries to run away, trying to escape the landlords and his guilt. Even after Bartleby dies,

the narrator is still consumed by the puzzling nature of Bartleby.

Because of the narrator’s obsession with Bartleby, I then equate Bartleby to a

poison or a disease. The most dangerous poisons are the ones that are undetectable,

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having no smell or distinct characteristics. The most dangerous diseases are the ones who

slip into your system without notice and cause damage when it’s already too late.

Bartleby, too, enters the narrator’s life without great notice yet he morphs into a problem

that consumes and infects the narrator. Then, one must ask, “Is Bartleby a villain? Is he

dangerous to the narrator?” It does seem, in certain places in the text, that Bartleby

controls the narrator subconsciously. The narrator “could not, for the very soul of me,

avoid falling into sudden spasmodic passions with him” (15), and at times Bartleby “not

only disarmed me but unmanned me” (16). If Bartleby were a dangerous villain, he

would have to have a secret agenda aiming to make the narrator go insane. Perhaps,

Bartleby impersonates a forlorn, eccentric man in order to trick the narrator into keeping

him since firing such a weak person would be cruel. By choosing not to dismiss Bartleby,

the narrator believes that he is serving some imaginative moral agenda when, in actuality,

Bartleby is fulfilling his.

If I continue to follow this train of thought, then the question still remains: Is

Bartleby a dangerous villain? It depends on what his agenda might be. However, since

Bartleby does not say much, we can only deduce his agenda on how the narrator is

affected. Since the narrator is not dead or physically harmed, Bartleby cannot be a villain.

However, because of Bartleby, the narrator has to deal with his own moral code.

Although the narrator seems like an agreeable man at first, the reader sees that he only

cares for his employees because of his eye for profit. The reader also sees that he cares

more about his reputation than the well being of others. Yet, the last line of the text (“Ah

Bartleby! Ah humanity!”) suggests that the narrator realizes the sad truth that he briefly

saw before: “happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides

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aloof, so we deem that misery there is none” (17). In short: life is pointless regardless of

our attempts to give it meaning.

Since Bartleby does plant this truth into the narrator’s life, he is like a poison or a

disease because he taints the life of the narrator by robbing him of his ignorance about

life and humanity. And yet, I have already proven that Bartleby is not a villain because he

does not intentionally seek to hurt the narrator. Also, Bartleby is not a true

transcendentalist. How I wish I could regard Bartleby only as an eccentric scrivener who

prefers not to do his work, goes to jail, and then dies! However, Bartleby robs me of the

luxury of simple classification. Perhaps it is easier to regard him as existential instead of

classifying him into every possible category. Although labeling Bartleby as an

existentialist is essentially the same as labeling him as an enigma, since they are both

mysterious and unsolvable, it will have to suffice.