Moby Dick

“Ah Bartleby!  Ah humanity!”  (Melville, 27)

By putting the two exclamations together, Melville seems to equate the two.  Although I saw the narrator as the most “normal” character in the story, this last sentence makes him the least human because he is the opposite of Bartleby.  Bartleby possesses a humanity that all of the other characters not only lack, but fail to understand.

Throughout the story, as we discussed in class, Bartleby’s free will stands out as his defining personality trait in the sentence “I would prefer not to.”  We think of free will as one of the characteristics that distinguishes people from animals, whom we think of as more simple-minded.  The narrator assumes that his staff will do whatever he tells them too…that they will follow him like sheep.  By assuming this, he shows that he himself is trapped in this mindless system.  So Bartleby is actually more of a human than the other characters.

Although Bartleby does not eat, live, or act like an ordinary person, he dies; and mortality is a defining characteristic being human.  While the narrator will just continue in his law practice, Melville has Bartleby take the ultimate step in life: death.  In his unchanging life, the static narrator is less human than the strange man he employs.

In this last paragraph as well, Melville reveals that Bartleby was once a “normal” person, too, like the narrator, because he at did have a “normal” job — clerkship in the Dead Letter Office.  This was a perfect job for him: a lost man sorting lost mail.

The Dead Letter Office could also be a metaphor for the rest of humanity –people, like the narrator, who have no purpose because they do not think.  They are going nowhere in life because they simply follow whatever path is in front of them [in the narrator’s case, this is the “easiest way of life” (1)].  While people are trapped on this path, Bartleby is in turn trapped in this world of people who cannot think for themselves.  Even when he leaves the office, he escapes that one dead office for another.  For him, staring out of a window for hours on end was not entrapment, because he wanted to do this.  The moments of his exerting his free will were like finding the rings and checks lost in the undeliverable mail — they show that true humanity exists, but cannot survive in such a place.  Bartleby is eventually squashed out of existence by the animalistic populace.

Bartleby, in losing the work that made him “normal,” began to gain a personality that made him human.  Maybe Melville wants to say that there are more important things in life than the day to day business that the narrator, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut are caught up in.  The enigmatic, seemingly ghostly man, who does everything out of the ordinary, is actually the most human.

“Dead Letter Office.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2009. Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_letter_office>.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” eNotes.com. 2010. eNotes.com, Inc., Web. 3 Mar 2010. <http://www.enotes.com/bartleby-scrivener-text/bartleby-scrivener-1>.

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