SOURCE: " 'Bartleby' as Paradigm," in The Method of Melville's Short Fiction, Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 26-44.

[Bickley is an American educator and critic with a special interest in the work of Herman Melville and Joel Chandler Harris. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of "Bartleby, the Scrivener, " noting the influence of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne on the story's style, structure, and themes.]

Technique and biography cannot be kept entirely separate in examining "Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street" (Putnam's, Nov., Dec. 1853); Melville's shift to magazine-writing, however his earlier work may have prepared him for it, was largely precipitated by circumstances. Moby-Dick and Pierre had not done well, and Melville seemed to lack the psychic and aesthetic energy to write another novel. . . . In October [1852] he was invited to contribute to Putnam's new magazine, and the possibility of earning income by the page seemed especially attractive. Then, in November, he visited Hawthorne and [the tentative plans for a story entitled "Agatha" came up in discussion]. Additionally, and this fact has not been given special attention, Melville acquired two volumes of Irving's works in June, 1853, just before he began writing "Bartleby."

Of these several circumstances, the most significant for my study is that two accomplished writers of short fiction were present at the birth of Melville's first magazine story. . . . Melville had had several years of preparation for his new art form and would always bring his own literary predispositions to bear on it. Yet he was ever dependent upon his sources, too, from Ellis's Polynesian Researches to Shakespeare, in the novels; in writing his short stories he consulted Irving and Hawthorne, and with some frequency. Irving's presence is chiefly felt in the narrative technique of "Bartleby" and Hawthorne's in the story's metaphysical dimensions. Also, both writers appear to have contributed considerably to Melville's method of characterization. These influences came together in a rather complex way.

The story seems to have owed its initial form and narrative design to the example of Irving. Melville had consciously or unconsciously been under Irving's influence for several years (Evert Duyckinck once felt that Melville began his career by modeling his writing on Irving's), even though he had, for rhetorical purposes, undercut Irving's significance as a writer in his review of the Mosses and in a complimentary letter on Hawthorne. No New York man of letters could avoid breathing in a little of Irving with the atmosphere, and [Melville's characters] Tommo, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket were all to some degree Crayonesque "sketchers" on tour. In addition, as William Hedges notes [in Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832, 1965], Irving influenced Mardi, and there are strains of "gothic risibility" and Knickerbockerism in the "conceited" prose of Ishmael.

Melville acquired the two volumes of Irving's works in the summer of 1853, and it seems likely that he was rereading Irving during the next three years. The rhetorical design and narrative strategy of several of Melville's tales parallel Irving's, and Crayon and his storytelling acquaintances are, it would appear, models for at least five of Melville's short story protagonists. It seems that Irving's example reinforced Melville's own best tendencies in first-person narration, and the new magazinist would have had reason to look to the older writer for short story ideas and form. The basic similarities between Irving's and Melville's tales are in matters of narrative perspective. Essentially, the "bachelor" is the controlling consciousness in Irving, as he was in Melville's novels and would continue to be, with some interesting variations, in his tales. As storyteller within the framing devices of Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller (where, characteristically, a dinner-table acquaintance of Crayon's reads a manuscript or recounts an adventure first-or secondhand), or as Crayon himself in The Sketch Book, the bachelor-observer senses his estrangement from the world and lingers as a nonparticipant on the fringes of life. Prone to sentiment, both real and affected, and even to mild neurosis, Irving's sketchers often ironically reveal more about themselves than about the external reality they pretend to describe.

Melville, following up his instincts and earlier narrative strategies, modifies and expands the Crayonesque proto-type in his magazine works. The first-person narrator acquires the rhetorical stature of an authentic protagonist who enters into the action of the sketch-become-tale rather than remaining outside, as observer or as teller of a story involving someone else. In other words, Melville deemphasizes Irving's often cumbersome framing devices and allows his narrators to tell their own stories. Compared to Irving's, his method is at once more dramatic and rhetorically demanding of the reader: it multiplies the possibilities for irony, making the narrator's moods and attitudes an emotional and intellectual grid through or around which the reader must, in Jamesian terms, "see."

These patterns are at work in "Bartleby." The lawyernarrator is a Crayonesque sketcher who enjoys storytelling and could, if he pleased, "relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep." Conservative, and himself a sentimentalist, the lawyer anticipates the narrative personae in several stories, "I and My Chimney," "Jimmy Rose," and "The Paradise of Bachelors." He insists on telling his reader about Bartleby, who was the "strangest" scrivener he ever saw. However, in acknowledging at the outset the difficulty of the task he has set for himself, for "no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography of this man," the narrator hints at one of the central ironies of the story: he will never succeed in "characterizing" Bartleby. The scrivener's personality, inner drives, and sensibilities will remain relatively unknown quantities to the narrator. The lawyer's character sketch is, in effect, a series of attempts to align or harmonize his clerk with something he himself knows or can respond to, and these attempts continually fail. Although the lawyer never realizes it, the "chief character . . . to be presented" will not be Bartleby, but himself.

Aside from its general method, "Bartleby" may also owe its particular generic form to Irving. As an extended anec-dote about an idiosyncratic law clerk, the story bears a resemblance to the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century sketches of character published in the periodicals. More particularly, John Seelye suggests [in "The Contemporary 'Bartleby,' " American Transcendental Quarterly 7, Summer, 1970], Melville responded to Putnam's invitation to write magazine pieces by turning to the popular tradition of the "mysterious stranger" tale, which originated in America with Irving's "The Little Man in Black" (Salmagundi). Although Hawthorne and Poe also contributed to the genre prior to 1853 ("Wakefield," 1834, and "The Man of the Crowd," 1840), Seelye contends that the delineation of the various responses by villagers to Irving's silent stranger and the "tag-end" explanation of the Little Man's origins were patterns imitated in "Bartleby."

There are, however, even more substantial similarities between Melville's tale and another story which Seelye ascribes, in passing, to the genre: "The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger" in Tales of a Traveller. Irving's tale is related to Crayon in the first person by an Englishman, who had met the subject of his story in Venice. He was a young Italian, physically similar to Bartleby in his pallor, emaciation, and haggardness of brow, who kept to himself yet who for an unknown reason needed to be near people. To the narrator the young man appears "tormented by some strange fancy or apprehension" and was afflicted with a "devouring melancholy." Inexplicably, the morose Italian chooses the narrator as a companion, as Bartleby does the lawyer, but remains uncommunicative about his troubles, commenting only that he needs sympathy but cannot talk with his befriender.

The Englishman tries to reason the Italian out of his melancholia, but to no avail: he "seemed content to carry his load of misery in silence, and only sought to carry it by my side. There was a mute beseeching manner about him, as if he craved companionship as a charitable boon." As the story progresses, the silent sufferer begins to have the same kind of effect upon Irving's indulgent narrator that the withdrawn scrivener would have upon Melville's "charitable" lawyer, yet neither man is capable of turning away the afflicted creature who seems to need his companionship. Observes Irving's narrator: "I felt this melancholy to be infectious. It stole over my spirits; interfered with all my gay pursuits, and gradually saddened my life; yet I could not prevail upon myself to shake off a being who seemed to hang upon me for support." Melville's lawyer responds similarly when he discovers that Bartleby had been sleeping in the office at night: "For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. . . . The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy!"

Irving's mysterious stranger eventually disappears. Characteristic of Mr. Knickerbocker's reliance on the story-within-a-story, however, he leaves his benefactor a manuscript which (in the next tale of a traveler) explains his history: he had murdered an unprincipled rival suitor and was fleeing the authorities. For reasons that will be discussed below, Melville leaves Bartleby's story essentially untold, although he does throw an Irvingesque sop to the common reader in the form of a "sequel." Irving had helped Melville find a structure for his first magazine tale and had offered him a compelling narrative strategy to build upon. Melville saw that he could multiply the thematic and rhetorical possibilities of his tale by involving the reader psychologically in the narrator's repeated experiences with a "mysterious" stranger. As in Irving's tale, no single encounter of lawyer and clerk is sufficient to explain the enigmas of Bartleby's character, and if the narrator's vision remains incomplete, so, Melville implies, may the reader's.

While "The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger" seems to have provided a pattern for Melville to follow, Bartleby is a more intense and suggestive character than Irving's romantically melancholic figure; there seem to be stronger influences from another quarter. Melville claims in The Confidence-Man that "original" characters are usually observable "in town," and there is considerable evidence to suggest that Melville turned to that skeptical and taciturn friend from nearby Lenox, with whom he had just shared the Agatha story, as he composed the portrait of Bartleby. If Melville's first short story is his most compelling tale, perhaps it is because when he wrote it he was haunted by the image of Nathaniel Hawthorne and by one of Hawthorne's most powerful themes, withdrawal and isolation.

As a nay-sayer, Bartleby is philosophically reminiscent of, and perhaps to some extent based upon, those protagonists in Hawthorne's gloomier short fiction whom critics have viewed as portraits of the artist, and in whose alienation is symbolized Hawthorne's own skeptical retreat. Goodman Brown's capitulation to pessimism and despair over the human condition, Parson Hooper's incommunicative withdrawal behind his mask, and Wakefield's more impish perversity synthesize in Bartleby, another alienated hero. Philosophically, in "Bartleby" and, with varying emphases, in later stories as well, Melville seems to have confronted anew the implications of Hawthorne's perception of "blackness." In this first story, however, he defined the ultimate extension of a Hawthornean world-view: a self-willed death. Bartleby, unlike Agatha, finally capitulates to the suffering he has experienced and to his skepticism about the possibilities for human understanding and love.

In commenting upon The House of the Seven Gables in a letter to Hawthorne in April 1851, Melville creates an image of both the novel and its author. He writes that the book is like a "fine old chamber" in one corner of which there is "a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled 'Hawthorne: A Problem.' " Bartleby, a symbol of that "certain tragic phase of humanity" that Melville saw embodied in Hawthorne and in his fiction as well, is also "A Problem" and a black-letter study. Hawthorne said "No! in thunder," and, Melville adds, "all men who say yes, lie"; to the same effect Bartleby states "I would prefer not to." The scrivener declines to adopt the distorted values and dehumanizing strictures of the outside world, and his soft-spoken refusal to join the ordinary course of life carries a strength of conviction equal to Hawthorne's emphatic "No!" Bartleby may speak for Hawthorne but he also speaks for mankind, and, true to his problematical nature, he whispers two different messages. Representing those who would "prefer not" to commit themselves to a meaningless way of life, he is a stoical study in what Melville terms in his story "passive resistance"; but through him Melville also warns humanity against a selfdestructive surrender to a vision of blackness.

Melville may have begun his tale as a parable of his own encounters with Hawthorne and his writings, but he used with brilliant effect a sentimental "sketcher" of somewhat limited perception to broaden the psychological and symbolical dimensions of his story. For the unnamed narrator comes to represent any man who, forced at last to question the assumptions and values he has always lived by, hesitates to admit to himself and to his readers that he faces a crisis at all; who, pushed beyond the limits of his own understanding and humanity, rationalizes his failings.

The first of Melville's short fiction "bachelors," the lawyer begins his story with an Irvingesque "author's account of himself." This opening sketch serves two rhetorical functions. It reveals the lawyer to be something of a sentimentalist, interested in conveying to his reader what he believes will be poignant impressions of his own personal "involvement" in his strange scrivener's life. Secondly, and more important, the self-portrait discloses how inextricably bound up the lawyer is in the material world.

The ethic that informs the narrator's life style, and too often his judgment as well, is that of free-enterprise capitalism. However, the narrator is not an ambitious lawyer; a man of "peace," he is content to do a "snug" business among rich men's bonds and mortgages, in the "cool tranquillity" of his "snug retreat" on Wall Street. His hero, and former client, is the late John Jacob Astor, a name that, he admits with a flourish, "I love to repeat; for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion." Astor had once commended him for his "prudence" and "method," yet in bragging that his associates consider him "an eminently safe man," the lawyer unwittingly suggests that inside knowledge about even financially shady deals would be secure with him.

A telling sign of his prudent but always utilitarian approach to his world is the office routine itself. He is willing to indulge the idiosyncrasies of Turkey and Nippers so long as they are, at least during half of each working day, "useful" to him. Thus, while Bartleby continues with his copying, although he may "prefer not" to follow certain orders, his employer keeps him on as a "useful" servant (the narrator will employ the word again when he introduces Bartleby to the "useful" grub-man in the prison). When the scrivener gives up copying, however, and his uselessness begins to interfere with the "method" of the lawyer's office, Bartleby constitutes a threat.

The rhythmic pattern of events prior to Bartleby's inevitable dismissal makes up the story's essential form: from the introductory self-portrait to the page-long "sequel" concerning the scrivener's earlier work in the Dead Letter Office occur approximately a dozen confrontations between the employer and his clerk. Melville's structure is rhetorically quite effective. It enables him to exhibit several distinctive responses to the enigma of Bartleby, none of which succeeds in revealing his character. Thus the levels of available meaning are multiplied, and the reader is left free to identify with any, or none, of the lawyer's emotional and mental reactions to his scrivener. Melville would find this method useful later, in the encounters of narrators and "original" characters in "The Fiddler," "The Lightning-Rod Man," and "Benito Cereno," for example. Melville's rhetorical strategy dictates that no interpretation of Bartleby offered by the lawyer could ever be complete, for the scrivener is a phenomenon totally alien to the narrator's experience and sensibilities. Yet the story raises an even larger rhetorical question. The lawyer may have his limitations, but does not Melville also suggest that Bartleby is incapable of giving enough of his own self to deserve even that charity which his employer extends?

Where does the moral or ethical emphasis of the tale rest, finally? In the best Ishmaelian tradition, Melville offers no neat answers.

Among his dozen or so confrontations with the scrivener, six of the lawyer's encounters are crucial in terms of method and meaning. Melville seeks at the initial stage of employer-employee interaction to identify the reader with the lawyer's perspective, for purposes of immediacy and veri-similitude; quickly, however, Melville tests the readernarrator relationship by skewing the lawyer's angle of perception.

Thus, at Bartleby's first preference not to perform some routine clerical tasks, the narrator is portrayed as baffled and stunned, as almost anyone would be. With the second round of Bartleby's preference-stating, however, a measurable amount of separation takes place between lawyer and reader. The lawyer decides, with a certain logic but with a recognizable degree of self-congratulation, that because Bartleby is "useful" to him he should befriend his clerk; in so doing he could "purchase a delicious self-approval" for his conscience. The lawyer's studied selfrighteousness gives way to what he claims to be a disturbing if not a painful awareness of Bartleby's spiritual condition, in the third phase of the encounters. He is surprised to find one Sunday that Bartleby has been sleeping in the office at night, solitary and companionless; but how authentic or sincere is the narrator's recounting of his discovery?

Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!

The lawyer has a felicitous turn of phrase, but his effusiveness is over-elegant and melodramatic—more appropriate to a romantic sketcher of "fine sentiments," trying to appeal to his audience, than to a sensitive perceiver of human need.

"A fraternal melancholy!" exclaims the lawyer as he contemplates Bartleby's loneliness. "For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam." Just as the reader is beginning to ask how much real communion there is in a fit of sympathetic melancholia, the narrator's mood passes. When he recalls forlorn Bartleby's "pallid haughtiness" and his habit of staring incommunicatively upon the dead brick wall outside his window, the lawyer feels "melancholy merge into fear" and "pity into repulsion." In attempting to account for this shift the protagonist says, defensively, "They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart." After all, "it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach." Of course this is precisely the point; the lawyer seeks on the next morning to "reach" Bartleby's soul in a commonsense fashion—by asking him questions about himself—failing to understand that an uncommon Bartleby who prefers to say nothing about himself cannot be so easily plumbed.

In the fourth confrontation, the lawyer's rational analysis of his clerk's behavior and its effects reinforces what his emotional responses had told him. He realizes that both he and his other assistants have, unconsciously, got in the habit of using the word "prefer," and he knows now that he must surely dismiss this "demented man" who is affecting them all in a "mental way." The scrivener's decision to do no more copying provides the lawyer his excuse, and he gives Bartleby six days to leave.

Up to this point Melville has portrayed his enigmatic scrivener from a narrative perspective that has undergone several reorientations. Initially, the lawyer is simply perplexed by Bartleby's behavior, nothing more; then he looks at his clerk from the standpoint of selfrighteousness, again as would a self-styled victim of melancholia, and yet again as a utilitarian rationalist. These four stances do not assist in revealing the "true" Bartleby to the lawyer, nor are they meant to; Bartleby is simply not going to make himself available for revelation.

In the fifth confrontation the scrivener undergoes metaphysical analysis, although the metaphysics is only rhetorical tomfoolery on Melville's part. From behind the persona of his narrator he toys with the reader for two full pages using a very large pun on the Doctrine of the Assumption, the Catholic belief that the Virgin Mary ascended into Heaven on August 15. Having given Bartleby severance pay, the lawyer assumes that he would now leave. "I assumed the ground that depart he must," recollects the lawyer, "and upon that assumption built all I had to say." But the narrator is "thunderstruck" six days later to find Bartleby still there. Characteristically, his response is melodramatic and exaggerated: " . . . I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell." Melville's punning on the Assumption grows explicit:

What was to be done? or, if nothing could be done, was there anything further that I could assume in the matter? Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively assume that departed he was. . . . I might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he were air. . . . It was hardly possible that Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious.

Dubious indeed, for Bartleby is Bartleby, not the risen Virgin Mary. Further along, Melville makes one last punning reference to the metaphysical question of Bartleby's power to transcend this mortal sphere. Still baffled by the clerk's continuing presence in the office, the lawyer demands: "What earthly right have you to stay here?"

Melville's pun on the Assumption is but one of several jeux-de-mots and witty asides in "Bartleby." The humorous dimensions of the story are an essential part of its surprising fullness and complexity of texture; the reader enjoys the Dickensian idiosyncrasies of Turkey and Nippers and laughs at the narrator for his sentimentality and propensity to over-dramatize his own plight, but the humor ceases when Bartleby's fate begins to close in on him.

The last important confrontation between lawyer and clerk raises the moral and theological questions that Melville was most concerned with in his story. Angry that the scrivener has achieved a "cadaverous triumph" over him, the lawyer is just barely able to contain what he now finds to be almost murderous thoughts about Bartleby. Luckily, he acts in accordance with his previously advertised virtue of prudence, and he recalls the charitable commandment "that ye love one another." Comforting himself during the next few days by reading "Edwards on the Will" and "Priestley on Necessity," he is nearly convinced that "Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom." But the narrator's Christian charity and faith capitulate to human pride and a slightly paranoid imbalance. His professional acquaintances criticize him for retaining in his chambers an odd vagrant who does absolutely no work, and the lawyer's imagination—more neurotic than melodramatic now—projects a lurid scene:

And as the idea came upon me of [Bartleby's] possibly turning out a long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and denying my authority; and perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing my professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over the premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon his savings (for doubtless he spent but half a dime a day), and in the end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy: as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more . . . a great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerable incubus.

Yet his mood would shift again. The dismayed narrator is still essentially a "man of peace," incapable of physically ejecting Bartleby and hesitant to summon the police. Instead, he moves his entire office elsewhere, and, "strange to say—I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of."

The lawyer is baffled by his scrivener because he is conditioned by the method of his profession and his life. Although one faults the protagonist for his blindness, Bartleby might, after all, have affected anyone as he did the narrator. [In "Melville's Comedy of Faith," ELH 27, December, 1960, William Bysshe Stein] contends that the lawyer cannot "involve himself emotionally" in the isolation of Bartleby, because the effort would entail "too great a strain upon his capacity for love and pity." And so, perhaps, with the reader. However, the lawyer's postseparation guilt and uncertainty about his lack of meaningful involvement only reinforce our image of his ineffectuality. Able to put up with occasional troublesome quirks in his office workers so long as they perform their duties, the lawyer fails when the humane indulgences that Bartleby seemed to seek grow too taxing. When his former land-lord sends word that he must do something about the man he abandoned, the frustrated lawyer literally denies his scrivener thrice—in effect betraying him into the hands of the authorities. His denials make him feel guilty, but his eleventh-hour efforts at the prison to provide for his clerk, his offers of lodging and a job and his paying for meals that Bartleby prefers not to eat, come too late. In his three most emphatic and resolute statements Bartleby tells his one-time employer, "I know you," "I want nothing to say to you," and "I know where I am."

As a "reward" for his puzzled readers and as a gesture by which he hopes to clear himself of any accusations of irresponsibility and uncharitableness towards Bartleby, the lawyer passes along "one little item of rumor" as a possible explanation of his scrivener's strange personality. Bartleby's experiences in the Washington Dead Letter Office had apparently convinced him that all life held was deprivation and despair—thus his pitiable forlornness.

Yet Melville would not so easily explain away the scrivener, nor so readily pardon the narrator. Surely there are more significant meanings latent in Bartleby's insistent use of the word "prefer" and in the walls he seems to identify with. During one of their encounters the narrator tested the extent of his scrivener's perversity by asking him to run an errand to the Post Office (probably the last place, if the rumor is correct, that Bartleby would ever want to go). The scrivener gives his standard reply, "I would prefer not to." "You will not?" demands the lawyer; "I prefer not," answers Bartleby (italics Melville's). The lawyer, characteristically, offers no meaningful interpretive commentary on this crucial distinction, but for the modern reader the sequence is an intriguing prefiguration of the existential dilemma. In "Bartleby" Melville portrays not only an obsessive Hawthornean vision of blackness, but also an image of one man's confrontation with what he feels to be the meaninglessness of the universe. Ahab had spoken of an "unreasoning force," inexorably in control of all nature, that denies man both identity and power. There is no possibility of meaningful action, Bartleby seems to say, and it is certain that man cannot successfully will anything. Perhaps the only tenable stance is merely to prefer to do something; this gives one at least a temporary hedge against fate, and somehow it is not quite so painful if one's "preferences" are denied. Bartleby never says "I will not," and the lawyer, habitually an avoider of conflicts and a postponer of decisions until his "leisure," never pushes his clerk beyond his preferences. At one point in the story the lawyer explains how difficult it was for him to put up with all those "peculiarities, privileges, and unheard-of exemptions" of Bartleby's, failing to realize that the "exemptions" Bartleby enjoyed were not of the clerk's making, but of his own.

Melville suggests that all man can choose to do is to endure and to state his wishes, although there are always hazards in making an obsession out of preferring. For if the lawyer errs in judgment, so does Bartleby in preferring to attach himself to one whom he, for some reason, has chosen to be his companion in his isolation ("I would prefer not to quit you," the scrivener tells his employer late in the story). Does Bartleby, the almost catatonic isolato who seems deathly afraid of even being brushed against by a fellow clerk, have the right to expect comfort or companionship from a person with whom he is incapable of sharing even the smallest modicum of his inner self? Unlike Ahab, Bartleby has neither strength nor will to aggress through the walls which hedge him in, a prisoner, and the lawyer's desertion is for the clerk like the final turning of the key in the lock. Indeed, Bartleby seems voluntarily to have made himself a prisoner of the walls he sees, perhaps because they, alone, do not make any demands on his privacy.

The scrivener, suggests Henry Murray, used silence and immobility to defend his integrity, but in the process he became alienated and a misanthrope ["Bartleby and I," in Melville Annual 1965, a Symposium: "Bartleby the Scrivener, "edited by Howard P. Vincent, 1966]. Thus, he dies alone and in a manner appropriate to his fundamental preference to remain separate: he prefers, finally, not to eat and dies with his head resting on the cold prison stones, rather than on humanity's pillow.

As Melville experimented with aesthetic distance and narrative form in his magazine fiction he returned frequently to two basic narrative personae: that of the genial, sentimental anecdotist who enjoys painting sketches of character or social settings, or writing familiar essays about himself, and that of the ironic protagonist who, in a sense, becomes the victim of his own story. Works in the first category include "Jimmy Rose" and "I and My Chimney," while "The Fiddler" and "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" feature the second type of narrative pose. "Bartleby" is paradigmatically significant because it illustrates both basic narrative postures: the lawyer is genial and an engaging anecdotist, but he is at the same time an ironic figure of incomplete perceptions. None of Melville's stories is free of rhetorical irony, and hence, as "Bartleby" would suggest, one should not force distinctions between "sentimental" narrative and "ironic" narrative too far.