Blog Post #3  Close reading of Bartleby

This image is available from the New York Public Library's Digital Library under the digital ID 1686930, author unidentified

In this story by Herman Melville he states “. . . , I had two persons as copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an office-boy.  First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut.  These may seem names, the like of which are not usually found in the Directory.  In truth they were nicknames, mutually conferred upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their respective persons or characters” (Melville, par 6).  I find it rather strange at best that in this story of “Bartleby, the Scrivener:  A Story of Wall Street”; the elderly lawyer finds it rather impossible to describe Bartleby in the same way he does his other employees.  He goes on in great detail for the next several paragraphs describing what he perceives to be their personalities, their looks, their attributes, their downfalls, their traits and on and on.  He is even pretty descriptive regarding himself as someone who believes that “the easiest way of life is the best”, and “an eminently safe man”; a person with “prudence” and “method” (Melville, par 3).  He talks about the simplicity of his office space including great detail in the views or lack thereof, the arrangement of the furniture and the locations of his clerks.  He is very descriptive in his details and paints a picture – you can (in your mind’s eye) picture all four of them quietly working away in this Wall Street office space.  However when it comes to Bartleby he doesn’t have much to say.  “Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small.  What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel” (Melville, par 1).  He continues later with “. . . pallidly neat, pitiable respectable, incurably forlorn” (Melville, par 15).  And then with “. . . a man of so singularly sedate an aspect” (Melville, par 16).  During my first read of this story in my annotations I listed “a figment of his imagination?” in the margin of the second paragraph.  One has to wonder why he is so descriptive of everything else in this story except of Bartleby.