Learning acceptance isn’t easy: Lessons from Melville’s “Bartleby”

I recently had the privilege of teaching Melville’s "Bartleby, The Scrivener" to a group of college students. The story had always seemed recondite, mercifully short when compared to Melville’s imposing Moby Dick, but no less confusing. An ambitious English major, I’d been trained to perform rigorous analyses and explications. Scanning a text for patterns of symbolism and imagery, instances of allusion and metaphor, I knew how to extract meaning and marshal theoretical frameworks. For years Bartleby resisted my ploys. 

The main character of Melville’s story, set in the mid-1800s, Bartleby transcribes legal documents at a Wall Street law firm. He works steadily, never partaking in office shenanigans stirred up by his erratic co-workers. He wins his employer’s praise and sympathy. Yet Bartleby stumps everyone one day when he refuses to proofread a document.

“I would prefer not to,” he declares. Calmly, without the faintest hint of resentment, Bartleby declines to cooperate. Before long, he also refuses to run errands entrusted to scriveners and eventually gives up copying altogether. Strangely, he won’t even leave the office in search of other work. Bartleby’s impassive demeanor and persistent, yet invariably polite silence, irritate, mystify, and disarm his employer. All attempts to reason with Bartleby, to explain his behavior and get rid of him fail.  

Critics have interpreted the story in various ways. Some have read "Bartleby, The Scrivener" as a critique of capitalism.  The task of copying makes Bartleby a mere cipher, not a creative agent. By refusing to work, the eponymous protagonist challenges the inhuman world of mechanized labor which rewards productivity, efficiency, and compliance.  For these critics, Bartleby’s response is one of passive resistance, a wrench thrown into the fast-paced and impersonal routines of a lucrative business.  

Others have focused on the narrator’s response to Bartleby, alternatively praising or censuring his efforts to understand and assist the young man. The narrator intuits that Bartleby’s silence conceals inner anguish of which loneliness is both the cause and the effect. Indeed, the only time the narrator draws a willing response from the reclusive employee occurs when, instead of issuing instructions, he simply tries to talk to him. Although the narrator’s goodwill seems genuine, it bears hints of self-congratulatory relish. For all his efforts, he treats Bartleby as a "problem" that must be solved to protect his professional reputation and appease his guilty conscience.  

Still other commentaries have suggested disability as the source of Bartleby’s perceived eccentricity and the reason for his employer’s struggle to reach him. Disability encompasses more than a medical condition. Even if Bartleby’s withdrawal from the normative rituals of work and camaraderie stems from an illness or a handicap, it also highlights his co-workers’ failure to encounter him on his own terms. A diagnosis might explain his behavior, but it doesn’t replace the need to broaden their established notions of normalcy and belonging.

Perhaps life experience has tempered my confidence in tidy interpretations one puts into bullet points to teach once, then recycle in future college courses. Perhaps I have realized that the questions I’d often asked myself and others proved to be the wrong questions which, instead of clarity, elicited more remote silence such as the inarticulateness Bartleby sinks into by the end of the story. Perhaps I have met too many people whose lives, like Bartleby’s, elude my efforts to relieve their burdens or clean up their messy decisions. While reading the story, I remembered the awkward relative who never quite fits into family gatherings. I pictured the neighbor whose life choices keep plunging her into deeper hardships. I thought of the friend whose circumstances laugh in the face of every defense mechanism and defy rational explanation. In all of these lives, I stood before a mystery: the mystery of their humanity and their freedom, the mystery of my own puzzlement.  

Like any good work of fiction, "Bartleby, The Scrivener" exceeds the sum of its interpretations. When I teach it, I’m still going to start with trusty bullet points, add fancy computer graphics, and attach helpful links. Yet even as I orchestrate another learning experience for my students, I’ll look for the real Bartlebys around me: the fragile and wounded souls who resist my attempts to fix, improve, or know their secret selves. “I would prefer not to,” they say when I share glib advice or offer the latest life-hacks. Like Bartleby, they shy away from officious inquiries or, rather, wait for questions I have yet learned to ask.