I've just begun a short article on the relationship between the ideas of Thoreau's "Life without Principle" and Melville's "Bartleby." Both writers, it seems to me, despair at the apparent loss of morality as growing American consumerism wins the hearts and minds of the public.
The narrator (who remains nameless throughout Melville's story) recognizes something of the immorality of a life driven by greed even though he lives a life led by selfishness. Dillingham writes that the narrator "must play the mental game of protective rationalization by accounting for his emotions and his actions in terms other than what they really are, responses to fear" (21), and that these rationalizations, most frequently, are "benevolence and self-interest" (27). It strikes me as rather ironic that self-interest could be a "protective rationalization" in a world where much of the narrator's problems are a result of his position in a (Wall Street/American) culture driven by self-interest. Self-interest is the problem, but it is also a successful and acceptable method of explaining away the problems.
Dillingham recognizes that the narrator, in direct contrast with Bartleby, cannot face himself:
The lawyer's differentiation between between busy and quiet Wall Street suggests a distinction between the outer and the inner man. He is horrified at the marked difference. His is the Wall Street of weekdays; he cannot and will not let himself dwell in the Wall Street of Sunday, that silent region of self-knowledge. (31)As the story progresses, the narrator passes from being a person relatively sure of himself to a person who laments the loss of principles. In the story's opening, he loves the sound of John Jacob Astor's name, which "rings like unto bullion" (3). Yet after confronting himself--via Bartleby--,he mourns, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!" (251).
It is Bartleby who serves as a catalyst for the change in the narrator from being a person "who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best" (3) to being a person who ranks Bartleby among "kings and counsellors" (249). Dillingham views Bartleby's position in selecting a profession as insisting that he be allowed to be "(1) unchanging, (2) unconfined, (3) unparticular, (4) definite, and (5) stationary" (43). In other words, Bartleby wants a job that allows him to be himself, whatever that might be, while the narrator initially wants a job that allows him the greatest salary with the least effort.
Dillingham sees Melville's depiction of Bartleby as "not unequivocally sympathetic" who "has to pay the terrible price of his humanity for being stronger, greater, and more honest than an ordinary man" (49), as "in a sense a 'Great Forger' because he cheats the world, and all that the world is an agent for, of its victory over him" (53). Dillingham concludes that Bartleby "is a dead letter, for in the world he has no place to go. . . . The lawyer is stirred by the rumor of the dead-letter office, but without having received any true communication from Bartleby" (53).
But doesn't he? Otherwise, how would we account for the change in the narrator's view of himself and the world around him? Dillingham claims that the narrator's "final words seem to reveal his greatest compassion and understanding" but that they actually "show him as the world, unreached by a dead letter" (54). The point, Dillingham says, is that the narrator "has failed to see with what force and finality Bartleby rejected and transcended humanity" (54).
Again, I disagree. First, Bartleby does not transcend humanity. If anything, he embraces humanity, but it is humanity of a different sort than the narrator (as a representative of commercialized American culture) knows, a humanity based on something human rather than on self-interest and money. And furthermore, the narrator does see something--there is very clearly something in Bartleby's message that reaches him.
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