Bartleby—A Law Student's Analysis

Herman Melville's short story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," contains sufficient depth and detail to support an infinite variety of analysis. This short piece will analyze the text against a central theme of our class. Specifically, I will address the empathy the narrator expresses towards Bartleby and how this conflicts with the narrator's description of himself.

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.

Appears, you mean, if we take what he says at face value only?

Of course, this depiction contrasts with the image of the ideal lawyer that we have been presented with this semester. The ideal lawyer strives for justice.

You think that's my point? That the "ideal" lawyer is trying to achieve justice? And that every non-ideal lawyer is therefore pursuing some other goal?

He eats well only when he satiates his clients.

Surely you don't mean that. Surely you know I don't mean that.

The hardest way through life is the only way through life, otherwise the lawyer has wasted the talents that nature and society has bestowed upon him.

What's this crap about the hardest way through life? The job is the job. The job is to seek justice for the client. Not having a client or not seeking justice are not doing the job.

Professor Moglen's lawyer would not profess “when at last it is perceived that such [misery] cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it” (16). According to the narrator, Professor Moglen's ideal lawyer is a touch illogical.

That's a strawman. You haven't any warrant for the premise, and the conclusion is therefore unestablished.

Bartleby challenges the narrator's equilibrium. The narrator cannot rid himself of Bartleby, even though everything in the preceding description suggests that he should. When Bartleby refuses to engage in proofreading, the narrator fails to dismiss him. “With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence” (9). Against the pretense of being a logical, ease-seeking professional, the narrator should have fired Bartleby.

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. Even when the narrator surrenders his office space to move to another location, simply to remove himself from Bartleby, he is unable to stay away from the tragic figure. The narrator reveals his 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 hesitation, this internal conflict, is inconsistent with the narrator's previous description of himself. The self-interested professional would fire Bartleby the second he refused to perform his duties. He would forcibly remove Bartleby, either using the state's force or his own, once Bartleby began trespassing in his office. He would forget Bartleby when he moved, content himself once he “perceived that [he] had now done all that [he] possibly could,” and move on to his other affairs. The narrator, for all his ruminations of logic and ease, cannot forget the tragic figure.

The troublesome aspect of this story, and this analysis, is that the narrator only develops empathy when he perceives an individual worthy of it. The narrator expresses little or no empathy for his other coworkers. He finds business-related reasons to remain patient with Turkey and Nippers. He expresses a small deal of admiration for Ginger Nut, but only in proportion to Ginger Nut's competence at his menial tasks. He certainly expresses little empathy or feeling when describing himself or his practice pre-Bartleby. It seems that some aspect of Bartleby's personality triggers the empathy that we witness wreak havoc on the narrator's logical decision-making process throughout the story.

So perhaps the empathy/no empathy dichotomy isn't a very good way of understanding this situation. Having written these sentences, perhaps it would have been a good path to read them over, see that the approach you took didn't actually illuminate the events, let alone the purpose of the work of art that describes them, and go back to look for another one.

Professor Moglen, however, suggests that any lawyer worth his salt would be empathetic before he began practicing.

I haven't suggested this, but I have suggested something else that might be confused with this suggestion. If the point is to summarize my ideas, however, Bartleby is probably not the place to look: I didn't write it.

The narrator in the story has practiced for many years (he is in his early sixties).

And understanding him, not by limiting oneself to believing what he says about himself, might be helpful.

The question that lingers is how we, as law students, develop empathy before we meet our Bartleby. How do we strive for justice before our conscience dictates that we should? Can we?

Why are these the questions? Others seem to me conceivable, even if the rule is that every question must be about you "as law students." For example, if your conscience doesn't dictate that you should strive to make justice for your clients, should you be in law school at all? Why do you think empathy is something you have to "develop"? Perhaps absence of empathy is like color-blindness, rather than like having a badly-trained memory.

-- AlexBuonocore - 25 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