First-person narration requires necessarily that the reader sees the story solely from the narrator’s perspective; and in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the promise of only a vague understanding of the title character is assured when the narrator confesses that he knows nothing about Bartleby. Even by the end of the tale, we know nothing more of Bartleby than that he does whatever he seems to “prefer” at the moment; and the narrator, unable to see any motive behind the latter’s whims, constantly struggles to supply his mysterious employee with one. Ironically, however, Bartleby enables the narrator comes to a greater self-awareness through their acquaintance. That is, nothing actually ever happens to or with Bartleby – he doesn’t allow anything to happen – while, similarly, the narrator never asserts any control over his own fate. The narrator, a man contentedly swept along with the current of life, has struggled to find his own motives in life, and he is drawn to Bartleby as a man apparently without any at all.
The first step the narrator takes in presenting Bartleby to the reader is to describe himself. In providing a substantial portrait of himself, the narrator also explains how he is able to understand Bartleby better than any other character in the story does – in his own words, “because some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented” (2). The narrator, an old lawyer, tells us, “I am a man who… has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best,” and who seeks “tranquility” as his sole end in life (3). Is not silent, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” Bartleby the same way (15)? The narrator seemingly saw something of himself in the young man upon first acquaintance, and hired him largely based on his “singularly sedate… aspect” (16). Far from displaying any motive for any action whatsoever, besides eating his ginger-nuts, the man seems to have no desire, or even capacity, to upset the flow of his uneventful routine. The narrator from the first is attracted to and fascinated by this stranger Bartleby as the very picture of simplicity. Whatever the undisclosed reason (if there is one) for this odd man’s behavior, it is something elemental and unchangeable in him – an unyielding “tranquility,” the same that the narrator ascribes to himself.
The narrator discovers eventually that Bartleby has no home but the office. Just like Wall Street on Sunday, he ruminates, Bartleby’s life is only “emptiness,” to the extent that he does not even care to find himself a home (88). While the narrator himself does have one, we get the impression that he does not have much besides – there is no mention of family or any social life besides that which accompanies his profession. This newest revelation only deepens the connection between himself and the strange young man, and the narrator is forced to acknowledge the “fraternal melancholy” that the two share (89). He tells us, “both I and Bartleby [are] sons of Adam,” and live among a pool of “uncaring strangers,” where each is ultimately isolated (89). The narrator treats Bartleby with otherwise unaccountable pity and understanding because he sees the latter as a mirror of himself.
The narrator is less of a mystery, since he reveals his thoughts to us, while Bartleby remains one throughout, but the two have undeniable similarities. The moments when the narrator feels he understands Bartleby can only be speculative – projections of his own outlook; but the frustration he sometimes feels at Bartleby is quickly quelled by the rationale that the other merely has an even more non-confrontational attitude toward the world.
Odes to Disquietude 