Bartleby, the Scrivener Melville, Herman | Sanford Pinsker (essay date 1975)
Sanford Pinsker (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: " 'Bartleby the Scrivener': Language as Wall," in College Literature, Vol. II, No. 1, Winter 1975, pp. 17-27.
[Pinsker is an American scholar and poet, and the author of several books on contemporary American literature. He has a particular interest in American humor and is known for his own witty critical style. In the following essay, he interprets "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as a statement on the inability of language to fully circumscribe human experience.]
Melville's puzzling story "Bartleby the Scrivener" threatens to make scriveners of us all, endlessly writing those dead letters called literary criticism. Scholars with a biographical bent have pointed out the parallels between the disaffected Bartleby and his equally disaffected author. Both were professional scriveners; both "preferred" to withdraw. For others, the story is a study in the application of passive resistance, one a Gandhi...
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