TPPM (9): "Bartleby" continued ...

[Tim Strzechowski]

[...] "Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow?" [...]

For anyone interested, there have been numerous threaded discussions regarding Bartleby on the Melville listserve, Ishmail-L, recently.  One post, by Arne od Weegh (posted 11/25/04), states:

  This week someone called my attention to the differences between the terms
  "firing" and "laying off." The unintended effect of this remark was that
  it made me notice that the narrator of the story does never say that his
  business is being affected by the ending of the office of Master in
  Chancery. It looks like a sure thing that he loses some earnings, since he
  expresses regret at losing the office.

  This is one example of what you can call a "blank space," by which I mean
  information not given while there are clues to infer that a development
  did occur.

  I now want to look at a second, perhaps more obvious, example. At the
  beginning the narrator announces that the story will contain all he knows
  about Bartleby, and at the end he declares his ongoing curiosity in
  Bartleby. Why then does he say nothing about the interview with Bartleby
  that prompted him to hire the scrivener? He only says that a few words had
  been spoking touching Bartleby's qualifications, but he does not specify
  what these qualifications entail.

  There might be more instances of information being (deliberately) witheld,
  but I think these two instances provide us with two striking examples of
  the narrator's subtle strategy in painting a certain image of himself (or
  his office). In any case, anyone who wants to argue that the narrator is
  entirely honest needs to account for these passages.

http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/Lists/American/ishmail.html
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