Moby Dick

What strikes me about the narration in Bartleby is Melville’s different approach in observing and analyzing insanity than in Moby Dick. In Moby Dick the shifting narrator delves into the very minds of those that are presumably insane, giving details that the reader would never have gotten had the entire novel been written completely through the eyes of Ishmael. In Bartleby, however, we are supplied with a consistent first person narrator who is trying to make sense of the curiosity that is Bartleby.

The question I found myself asking, however, is not whether Bartleby was crazy, but whether the narrator was crazy. Bartleby does not make sense as a person. He supposedly subsists on ginger nuts, and prefers not to do anything:

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts.

Take note of the use of punctuation. Read aloud this passage sounds choppy and, frankly, like a rant. The narrator is incredulous of this man, as is the reader. But does he ever question Bartleby’s very existance? This is another curious difference from Moby Dick. There is never a point during the novel where I wonder whether a character is real or an apparition. I believe that Melville uses this uncertainty to disrupt the concept of insanity itself. Who is to say who is insane? Is it just as curious to Bartleby (if Bartleby is real) that this man is so concerned with reading over a copy, or that he eats a “regular” diet? Perhaps Melville’s point is to say that the line between sanity and insanity is thin at best, and that what is socially considered “insane” may perhaps be a higher level of consciousness that is, infact, more sane than any “sane” person could be.

This  brings to mind Pip’s descent to insanity. Melville describes Pip as almost entering another realm of existance:

He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 402

I believe this to be the essential question of Bartleby, especially since Ginger Nut refers to Bartleby as “a little bit luny”. Whether Bartleby or the narrator is crazy, Melvilles narration effectively makes the reader question the nature of sanity.

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