Bartleby: The Narrator's Unborn Child
BARTLEBY: THE NARRATOR'S UNBORN CHILD In Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," a scrivener named Bartleby disrupts the narrator's tranquil lifestyle by means of mere passiveness. Bartleby leads a morbid existence and everything that he says or does is characteristically mild. Although Bartleby has the raw characteristics of a human being, his personality, actions and conversations suggest that he never truly lives. Examining Bartleby's unborn nature more closely, the reader can infer the narrator's feelings towards Bartleby and understand more cohesively the truth behind his existence. Bartleby can barely be considered a living human being. Bartleby does indeed hold a job, wear clothes and have the other basic requirements to be considered an acceptable modern human being. Bartleby also has the basic items to live on stored under his desk, "I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese" (12) . However, these raw characteristics do not mean that Bartleby lives in the true sense of the word. In fact, the story suggests that Bartleby does not truly live and
Guilt explains why the narrator tells the reader the story. Additional inhuman characteristics coupled with wall imagery symbolizing a womb strongly characterize Bartleby as an unborn baby. that he has never lived throughout his entire life. Bartleby's deathlike lifestyle coupled with Melville's wall imagery implies to the reader that Bartleby is symbolically the narrator's unborn child. By describing Bartleby as odd, the narrator seeks to lessen the severity of his death and thus, of his guilt. The narrator's realization that his life was just as depressing as Bartleby's stung him with unbearable melancholy. The diagram of Bartleby's closed off office within the narrator's larger office suggests that Bartleby's office is the womb of the narrator's larger office. These three descriptions are chief characteristics of a baby before he or she is born. By taking care of Bartleby, the narrator identifies the unfulfilling materialistic and status driven elements of his own life in Bartleby's comatose life. For example, Bartleby's office was assigned to "a corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of them" (6) and compartmentalized by a "high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby" (6). The narrator yearns to learn more about Bartleby to explain his death and raise the burden of guilt from his shoulders.
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