Moby Dick

Let me start by saying I don’t get Bartleby. At all – similar to the narrator. But what I do know is that trying to figure him out, an almost un-human human in any social sense, with the emotions more normal people experience will fail to hit the mark. The few glimpses we get of Bartleby’s interactions are intepreted by the narrator and in them he ascribes his own his own ideas of what he would intend in a given situation to what Bartleby did in the given situation. This is most apparent when the narrator attempts to analyze Bartleby’s actions. Reacting to Bartleby staying in the office after he was fired,

Turning the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me, – this too I could not think of.

The last part of the sentence is most important. If Bartleby really is cadaverous, it is hard for me to believe that he enjoys some perverse pleasure in subverting his boss’s authority. Even if there is a lurking desire and motive under his show of indifference, it seems to be self-interested. Bartleby did not come to the office, I think, a different person, and takes up the agenda of not doing anything there; he would have always been who he is – quiet, strange, and keeping everything to himself.

What seems to happen, then, is a projection by the narrator of what his motive would be if he were to say something like that to him. What this tells us, then, is that the narrator would be looking to subvert his authority if he were working for himself (I am trying to have this example without trippy self-subversion symbolic possibilities), revealing his own psyche. And I suppose now that I am just unpacking what a projection does.

This reminds me of one of my favorite parts of Paradise Lost. When Satan first sees the unthinkably beautiful Garden of Eden, while he marvels at its wondrousness, the scene is also described with a sadness. Trees, though gorgeous, cry. It would be an incorrect reading, I believe, for the reader to just assume that the Garden of Eden has this sadness in it. I don’t think it does. Adam and Eve have not fallen yet, and, excepting Satan’s presence, the world is perfect. It is Satan that projects the sadness onto the landscape. And because the reader identifies with Satan, we too can project this same sadness. After all, we are the descendants of fallen people, we are a fallen race. Similarly, the narrator of Bartleby projects onto Bartleby, and we can do the same. We share a more normal psyche and interpretation of events and words. And, moreover, while trying to ascertain what Bartleby means, and who he is drives a significant amount of interest in the book, this element of projection encourages readers to look into the narrator to understand the work more completely.

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