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How does Melville portray the "human condition" in "Bartleby the Scrivener"?
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Although Bartleby is not literally dead, he behaves as if he were already dead. He even thinks of himself as being dead, often referring to himself in the third person, “Bartleby.” In fact, Melville describes his face with words usually associated with death. We also learn that Bartleby has spent time in the Dead Letter Office and that he still resides next door to it on Wall Street, as if Death were not far away. While Melville never reveals how Bartleby dies at the story’s end, there is a suggestion that he will become one of the letters he once delivered.In many ways, Melville’s story "Bartleby the Scrivener" can be read as an allegory for the human condition. Man is fated to die, as are other animals. However, unlike other animals, man is aware of his own mortality and therefore spends time wondering about his purpose in life, his reason for even being, and pondering his ultimate death. In some ways, the character Bartleby personifies the human condition.
Bartleby is paralyzed by his ultimate fate; so paralyzed, in fact, that he stops doing anything as he awaits death. Although he begins as a diligent worker—this phase of his employment probably parallels the youthful phase of a person’s life—he quickly moves to another stage where he declines to do anything, so obsessed is he with his pending death.
In fact, all descriptions of Bartleby are suggestive of death. Melville describes Bartleby’s initial appearance.
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man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.
He was motionless, pallid, forlorn, almost as if he were already dead. Later he is described as passive, still, immovable, cadaverous, and pale. These are all words that could as easily describe a corpse. Bartleby also barely eats.
When the lawyer calls him, he finally appears “like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation…” Bartleby also constantly “stand[s] at his window in his dead-wall revery.” Is Bartleby already dead or is he awaiting death?
On the other hand, is Bartleby himself death? He is also described as “he was always there;—first in the morning, continually through the day, and the last at night.” This could also be a description of death itself.
When the lawyer asks Bartleby why he behaves in the strange manner, his response is, "Do you not see the reason for yourself," he indifferently replied. Bartleby is indifferent to his fate because he has given up fighting death. The lawyer says, “something in condolence with him.” Again, Meliville uses a word, condolence, that is associated with death.
The lawyer also says, “I first simply suggested to Bartleby the propriety of his permanent departure.” “Permanent departure” is reminiscent of death, as well. The lawyer refers to his former office where Bartleby still resides as his “old haunt,” using another word associated with the dead. Bartleby is ultimately “conducted to the Tombs.” Finally, the lawyer discovers that “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office."
Bartleby's behavior is a systematic withdrawal from "life." It begins as a refusal to perform the regular tasks of his employment he is assigned. The refusals are extended to Bartleby's unwillingness, or even inability, to move himself physically from the office. Eventually when he's thrown in prison, he refuses to eat and so, starves to death.
Melville views the human condition as one in which modern man is alienated from his work and from the people and activity around him. Bartleby's connections with the world have been severed. Obviously this isn't a "universal" human condition, or nobody would do anything and the world would come to a stop. But the root of Bartleby's situation, and the general behavior of alienated characters in literature, is their inability to be fulfilled by anything, to experience emotion either positive or negative. In Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us on the first page that when this happens to him, his solution is to go to sea. In Camus' The Stranger, Meursault kills because he's indifferent to the outer world and to him, it instinctively makes no less sense to kill someone than not to. Bartleby, similarly unfulfilled and disconnected, sits there and does nothing because it's all the same to him what he does or doesn't do—ultimately including dying. This, to Melville, and to Camus in a different way, is the human condition, or man's fate.
How you understand the “human condition” Melville is trying to address in “Bartleby” depends on how you understand Bartleby’s ambiguous motto, “I would prefer not to.” If you think of this as a refusal to work for the lawyer, a kind of declaration that Bartleby is on strike, then the “human condition” of the story could be thought of as the work conditions in the lawyer’s office and the exploitation of Bartleby and the other clerks by their capitalist master. I don’t think that reading is the best one however; the lawyer does seem to care (or pretend to care) about Bartleby, and the peculiarities of the clerks that work for him (Turkey and Nippers, for example) seem to be recognized and tolerated.
A better reading, in my opinion, is to think about Bartleby as a cipher. He becomes a kind of existential problem. His “I would prefer not to” is akin to a categorical imperative; Bartleby doesn’t just opt out of work, he opts out of life, or existence. In this sense, the “human condition” would be the lawyer’s need to connect with Bartleby, to figure out who he is as a person. The story is really less about Bartleby than the lawyer’s conscience, and his need to discover or invent a version of Bartleby that justifies or confirms his sense of morality. In this light, the “human condition” is the need for, and impossibility of, true emotional connection.
Melville is very concerned with capturing the "human condition" in "Bartleby the Scrivener." Consider the working conditions of all characters in the story. They're in a cramped space, practically on top of one another, doing the mundane and dissatisfying job of copying legal contracts by hand. No one is really "normal" in this environment. Turkey and Nippers can really only put in a good day between them, as one is no good in the morning and one is relatively worthless in the afternoon. Ginger Nuts is supposed to be apprenticing the law in some fashion but is relegated to mere errand boy. Their office is not an environment conducive to productivity; Bartleby's window, for example, has a view of a wall. They're all just trying to cope, and Bartleby kind of speaks for all workers of that day who were in such unfulfilling and unsatisfying jobs.
This story is set just at the end of the Industrial Revolution, when workers were generally dissatisfied; Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is the mantra of the working class who is moving into the world of working inside in what we would today call "cubicle jobs." This, then, is the "human condition" with which Melville is concerned--the plight of the working man, used to space and productivity, now crammed into offices doing work which is neither productive nor fulfilling.