Moby Dick

As much as I am intrigued by the countless complexities presented in Melville’s story, Bartleby the Scrivener, I decided to focus specifically on the last paragraph in which the reader, and the lawyer, gains the tiniest bit of perspective on Bartleby’s life prior to his simple existence as an obstinate Scrivener. Just as the narrator wonders, I too wonder whether such a miserable job–burning letters that have been sent to people who have since died or vanished–was the cause of Bartleby’s gradual demise and ultimate descent into possible insanity. Upon the narrator’s discovery of Bartleby’s prior employment, he exclaims,

“Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can nay business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters…”(Melville 29).

The narrator’s assumptions seem perfectly logical to me, however I wonder if he is simply using this small tidbit of knowledge about Bartleby to excuse what really happened to Bartleby, and moreover the narrator’s personal failure in helping Bartleby escape his misery. I am just questioning this idea, because throughout the story the narrator is constantly questioning himself and weighing his obligation to help Bartleby vs. the annoyance of his presence in his office. I’m not sure if this critique holds much ground, but it was just one of my initial reactions to the narrator’s response to Bartleby’s past.

In further examining Bartleby as a dead letter sorter and what dead letters may symbolize I think it is important to note the final line of the story. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” (Melville 29). In closing the story with this boldly symbolic statement, Melville is obviously trying to emphasize to the reader that Bartleby and his fate are a symbol for the plight of human existence and perhaps the consequences of societal pressures and constraints. And what is Melville trying to say the ultimate consequence and outcome of becoming trapped within the constructs of society…? Well, death of course. I think there is a lot to be said about the message Melville is offering concerning the daily struggles of a man stuck in the repetitious work of middle class America who is constantly subject to the will of others, but that is a whole other discussion. I think that Bartleby’s period of employment at the Dead Letter office symbolizes the nature of Bartleby’s demise. Just as the narrator describes the letters as “on errands of life, these letters speed to death”, Bartleby, on his path towards liberation and freedom via the assertion of his individual will (by “preferring not to”) he has actually initiated his path to death.

The premise of the Dead Letter Office remains somewhat of a mystery to me, but I think it is an interesting way to end the story. Melville could’ve simply concluded with Bartleby’s death, but he decided to provide the reader and the narrator with some perspective into Bartleby’s mysterious existence with the Dead Letter Office. Ah Melville! Ah humanity!

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