Moby Dick

I can’t make heads or tails of Bartleby. But I thought it would be interesting to reflect on his character anyway.
He lives  frugal life and does not seem to care about material. After learning that Bartleby had been living in his office, the narrator recalls, “Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese…” (6).
As the story progresses, he refuses to do more and more things. He does not wish to work, he does not wish to move, and then he even refuses to eat. He gradually refuses to participate in more and more facets of what most people consider to be a “normal” part of life.  I find his refusal to eat at the very end to be the most intriguing of his actions. Not only has he come to reject that which is asked of him by others, but he has even gone as far as to deny his own body sustenance. His  seems to want to detach himself- by himself I mean his mind, his spirit, whatever you would like to call it – from the sensible world. By the end of the story it’s as if his spirit, is dangling onto his body, i.e., the physical,  by a thread. His connections with the physical world have diminished to a point where the next logical step would be death. But why gradually? Why not just jump off a bridge? Who knows?

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