Virtual Intercourse: A Scrivener's Experience in the Non-Being
Starting with the narrator's claim that he was going to relate a story about Bartleby, "the strangest [scrivener] I ever saw or heard of," Melville begins a juxtaposition where everything but Bartleby is discussed in some detail. The resulting circumvention causes Bartleby to be discussed more as a causal force than as a human. While the narrator admits he has limited information about Bartleby, he makes little effort throughout the course of the story to discover anything about him. He appears oblivious to Bartleby's slow deterioration from that of a mournful soul to a mechanistic being whose relevance has ended. Rather, he spends the majority of the time dwelling on how Bartleby's severely limited but profound intercourse with the inhabitants of the office greatly affects the narrator's own life.

To the narrator, Bartleby is much less a real man than an object of curiosity. He is so taken with Bartleby's limited responses, mostly containing some variation of the word "prefer," that he never contemplates what human experience could place a man in such a position. This is demonstrated by the narrator passing up each opportunity to query a little further into the psyche of Bartleby. On the Sunday when he caught Bartleby locked within his chambers, the narrator does not stake out the doorway in an attempt to see if Bartleby was alone or with company. He instead obeys Bartleby's wish that he walk around the block several times. For a lawyer, the narrator spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing his own being and precious little time evaluating Bartleby.

There are three times in the story that the narrator appears to try and aid Bartleby. The first is when he visits him in the stairwell and attempts to offer alternate work options. The second is when he pays the prison guard a little silver to provide Bartleby with edible food. The final incidence is when he stops by the jail to see Bartleby only to find him newly dead. While those limited efforts could be construed as a genuine effort to help, as the narrator most likely told himself, they were all much to little and much to late. Throughout the story, when Bartleby refuses to proof copy or simply stands for hours looking blankly at the brick wall, the narrator does nothing except solicit statements from his other office workers that Bartleby's behavior is not normal or even tolerable. He takes no action except engaging Bartleby in a few verbal exchanges and then moves his office to avoid the problem altogether.

It is through the narrator's inaction that Melville poses the question of how much responsibility a human should have for his fellow man in such a dehumanizing and mechanistic era. It is clear through the tone of the story that the author believes the narrator had a larger duty to aid Bartleby than he exhibited. The tragic nature of the story's end, where the narrator comes back to visit Bartleby a mere 20 minutes after he has passed on, brings closure to Melville's point that our individual responsibility to our fellow man cannot be taken lightly or just occasionally on a whim when it might seem convenient.

Mark Fisher
February 21, 1995

9/3/96