Bartleby—A Law Student's Analysis

This short piece addresses the reflection narrator sees of himself in Bartleby in Herman Melville's short story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street."

Prior to Bartleby's entrance, the narrator describes himself as an experienced, self-possessed professional. He knows what he wants and he seems to have acquired it. “I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (1). The narrator was recently appointed a Master in Chancery, for which he completes little arduous work and yet is compensated pleasantly. He approaches life from a distinctly self-interested point of view, and yet this self-interest occasionally compels him to help others. “Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should … prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy” (23). In contrast to his two copyists, who take turns flubbing their work according to the hour of the day, the narrator appears content and controlled. In short, the narrator appears to live a work life that many of us desire for ourselves. He is cool, collected, and well-paid.

Of course, this depiction contrasts with the image of the lawyer that we have been presented with this semester: the lawyer that seeks justice for his client. The narrator faces this unpleasant reality when his crafted appearance is betrayed by Bartleby's arrival.

The narrator sees himself reflected in Bartleby, and this drives an obsession with him. No history is provided about Bartleby until near the end of the story. This yields a blank canvas (or empty vessel) for the narrator to project himself onto as he starts to identify with Bartleby. The narrator's remark that he 'never feels so private as when he knows Bartleby is there' is palpable.

The narrator cannot rid himself of Bartleby, even though everything in the preceding description suggests that he should. He alternates between lashing out at Bartleby and coddling him. This irrational behavior from a self-styled cool, collected man may point to seeing something in Bartleby that the narrator dislikes about himself. The narrator's complacence to Bartleby's slow drop in work-ethic may be to criticize the routine and sterile world the lawyer lives in, doing "safe" but well-paid work on Wall Street. The narrator in the story has practiced for many years--he is in his early sixties--and is in a career for an 'eminently safe man.' Challenging Bartleby means challenging the decisions he has made for himself, something he is not willing to confront after practicing for so long.

Bartleby continues to challenge the ease and logic in the narrator's life, yet the narrator fails to rid himself of Bartleby every single time. When Bartleby originally fails to complete his work, the narrator rationalizes his decision not to fire him by reasoning between logic and altruism. “Poor fellow! Thought I, he means no mischief…He is useful to me. I can get along with him.” When the narrator discovers that Bartleby lives in his office, without his permission, the narrator is unable to ask him to leave. He again rationalizes this decision. The narrator comments on the loneliness of Wall Street on nights and weekends, and empathizes for the lonely Bartleby.

When the narrator surrenders his office space to move to another location, simply to "isolate him from sight" but not voice, the narrator is segregating the feelings inside him that Bartleby represents. The narrator reveals this internal conflict when he addresses the lawyer who moved into his old offices. The narrator pretends not to know Bartleby's name, and originally refuses to do anything about him. However, once the narrator finds a way to rationalize the interaction (by fearing his own exposure in the papers), he immediately runs off in his attempt to convince Bartleby to quit the premises.

This reading may have been assigned to drive this point: any lawyer worth his salt thinks before mindlessly entering a practice. A lawyer brings justice to her clients by thinking about the work she's doing and the career she is embarking on, not by pawning a license in a "safe" workplace.

This is the tragic story about the trap of looking back after a career in law and wondering how you missed the opportunity to make the world a more just place. Someday you or I may be the narrator, confronted with Bartleby, and not being able to admit to ourselves that a lifetime went by, and we missed it.

(AlexBuonocore, EbenMoglen, HarryKhanna, 27 Mar 2012)

I think developing empathy requires conscious practice and constant socialization. I always considered myself an empathetic person, and believed my parents taught me well how to place myself in somebody else's shoes before reaching a conclusion. This self-perception has been shattered during the first year of law school for three reasons 1) the stress of getting good grades as a 1L justified my abandonment of almost every aspect of my life other than studying 2) the isolation of the 1L experience further shielded me from the rest of the world and led me to believe this abandonment was ok and 3) reading about John Brown and Tharaud and listening to Professor Moglen's accounts of stories of injustice opened my eyes to how much I've been ignoring.

But Skylar, it does not follow: (1) that you were taught empathy, in the sense that you were taught how to ride a bike; (2) that you have lost more than a "perception" that you possess empathetic cognition; or indeed (3) that any cognitive change has taken place. You may have dissociated your empathetic personae, or stopped responding to perceptual stimulation from mirror neurons.

It wasn't pleasant to realize I was no longer the empathetic person I once considered myself to be, especially when I still have half a semester of law school, and a set of exams to get through. So I've been trying an experiment to help myself re-develop a sense of empathy. The experiment involves behavioral psychology and consists of three steps: 1) recognizing outward manifestations of when I am developing a strong (potentially unjustified) opinion and 2) consciously being alert to those physical manifestations manifesting themselves and 3) when I see that outward manifestation, I attempt to consciously interrupt and replace whatever unconscious opinion I was developing. I paid careful attention to myself, and other people's reactions to me during class and realized that whenever I experience a strong opinion about somebody/something I vigorously tap my foot or clench my jaw. Now when I notice I'm tapping my foot or clenching my jaw I instantly reflect on what I was thinking about/who I was interacting with/what I was reading about, figure out what opinion I was developing, and force myself to create a backstory in opposite to the original opinion I was developing about the person/situation. In this way whenever I am unconsciously judging somebody/something I bring it to my attention, and force myself to view the person/situation in a different light.

This technique requires self-reflection, consciousness, and figuring out a creative solution to change your mind. I think this technique could be applied to help us develop a sense for justice before our conscience dictates that we should. We need to learn to recognize the physical manifestations of our reactions to injustice, remain alert to when those physical manifestations are occurring, and consciously make an effort to change them.

This is a very interesting form of self-administered cognitive behavioral therapy. I think the report of your success in using it is both genuine and fascinating. But I'm not sure whether "forcing" yourself to think differently addresses the issues you want to address. Perhaps it modifies your behavior at the expense of the harm done by "forcing," rather than assisting you to change in ways that will reduce the purpose of the resort to force. Addressing, for example, the belief that law school success is assisted by social isolation or is primarily a matter of "more studying" might be more effective in the medium term, and more helpful in adding to self-knowledge above the behavioral level.

My interpretation of the above comment is: I am putting a band-aid on a gaping wound and what I need to do instead is re-grow the missing cells where the wound now sits. I am attempting to re-learn empathy instead of fixing the underlying problem. If this is what the above comment means (actually, regardless of whether this is what it means) I agree. It was hard for me to see this point, because I didn't want to see this point, because it's a deeper and harder problem to fix. Actually, I thought it was a deeper problem to fix. Now that I am very consciously thinking about it, maybe it's not so hard. I will re-focus the problem and change the method. If instead the underlying problem is my belief that social isolation and "more studying" is what I need to do well on the exam then I need to figure out why I think that. In attempting to answer this problem I will first engage in stream of consciousness, and then revist the problem later using Freud's concept of free association. I think isolation/more studying is the answer because it's an easy excuse to be very selfish during this time period and isolating myself feeds a hedonistic, self-centered viewpoint of the world which is very tempting for me to fall into. Additionally it prevents me from hating myself later. In the near future I will be able to look back and console myself that I dedicated all my time to studying and therefore I won't be able to punish myself later. But that's how I approached last semester and I am still punishing myself now. Why am I not learning from my mistake and why is my natural inclination to punish myself and berate myself. Maybe it's not that my natural inclination is to punish myself, but rather, that I feel uncomfortable without structure. It's a lot easier for me to punish myself and berate myself for the past because when looking at something retrospectively I can see the structure of the whole picture. I can see my behavior, and the results it led to. I hate thinking about the present and take a passive approach to the present because I am unsure of the results my present actions are going to cause. So if my problem is feeling unstructured, and having no result, then maybe the solution is to consciously create the future result [of my present behavior] in the present. I need to convince myself of the result that will come of my actions, instead of changing my actions to produce a different result.

-- SkylarPolansky - 26 Mar 2012

Just thought I'd chime in with my two cents. After having read Bartleby, I can see where Eben is coming from in calling it a ghost story. I don’t see Bartleby as a ghost in the conventional sense - such as a spirit of a deceased person - but rather as an external manifestation of one of the pieces of the narrator’s subconscious soul, which has ‘split’ through the course of his struggle with cognitive dissonance in his Wall Street practice. To run with the Harry Potter analogy often evoked in class, Bartleby is to the narrator as a Horcrux is to Voldemort (or for the superstitious of you, He Who Must Not Be Named).

The narrator recognizes that he has taken on the “easiest way of life” and characterizes himself as an “unambitious lawyer [who does] a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds”. He is confined all day in an office, blissfully protected from knowledge of the trials of the outside world by a lack of view. Throughout his “safe” career serving the rich he has forgotten the injustices visited upon the poor. He has suppressed an underlying knowledge that these injustices exist in attempt to remain content and ‘snug’ in his comfortable life.

That is, however, until one day – unbeknownst to him- this persistent cognitive dissonance and detachment from the world below becomes too much to bear and his soul ‘splits’ – giving rise to young Bartleby and his austere 'preferences'. The narrator waffles between shock, confusion, acquiescence, rage, pity, repulsion, and empathy in his reactions to Bartleby’s passive resistance. Staggering in his “own plainest faith”, he seeks guidance from passion and reason (represented by either Turkey or Nippers, depending, of course, on the time of day). The counsel he receives, however, from such “disinterested persons” regarding how to deal with Bartleby’s intrusion on his mental and emotional sensibilities does not prove to be helpful in confronting his ghost. While the narrator has attempted to cognitively train himself to ignore injustice by erecting barriers to impede his view of it– such as a Wall Street office, a ‘viewless room’ and in Bartleby’s case, a screen, it remains ever pervasive and is “always there”. The presence of Bartleby symbolizes the piece of the narrator’s soul that acknowledges this – a piece that can no longer be suppressed and refuses to be ignored or dismissed. While I’m unsure of whether the narrator ever acquires sustained self-realization, he has a momentary break through on page 15 when “for the first time in [his] life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized [him].” The narrator feels the common bond of humanity and realizes that “happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.” The narrator has perpetuated his own vision of a comfortable life by refusing to seek out the misery that hides aloof and looking only to the light.

While he briefly toys with feelings of repulsion, brought on by his perception that pity for Bartleby (and others facing injustice or misery) cannot lead to “effectual succor,” so “common sense bids the soul rid of it”, I do not think the narrator adheres to this view at the end of the piece. But I have trouble discerning whether he has undergone a metamorphosis in the end of it all. While he has certainly been “seriously affected…in a mental way” by Bartleby’s presence in his life, has he been freed from his cognitive dissonance? What will the long-term effect of this disturbance will be? What role will Bartleby’s ghost serve in re-defining the narrator’s future? Does Bartleby merely represent the Ghost of Christmas Past - the people or clients that the narrator could have helped had he chosen to abandon the snugness of his Wall Street office to witness the reality of injustice and misery on the streets? And if so, while it may be too late for the narrator to do justice for Bartleby, is it too late for him to change altogether? Or could Bartleby simultaneously serve as the Ghost of Christmas Future for the admittedly less Scrooge-y narrator, and inspire change in the face of self-realization and human awakening?

-- MeaganBurrows - 27 Mar 2012