Melville’s “Bartleby” as Parable

Whereas Hawthorne needed to subtitle his story “The Minister’s Black Veil” as a parable, Melville was content to nuance the metaphorical dimension of “Bartleby” by alluding to the Bible and expecting readers to connect the dots.

Perhaps the most obvious reference is to Matthew 25, where God acknowledges the righteous by associating their kindness to the downtrodden as kindness to him. For this reason, the narrator is tormented by guilt that he has not done right by Bartleby, who is the “forlornest of mankind,” or (according to Matthew) the “least of these.” The notion that ignoring Bartleby’s fate might be the equivalent of ignoring God is reinforced by the narrator’s denial of responsibility for his former employee. When a lawyer asks what he ought to do about Bartleby’s refusal to vacate the premises of the narrator’s old office, the narrator replies: “I am very sorry, sir,…but, really, the man you allude to is nothing to me–he is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold me responsible for him.” As the footnote in our text observes, this denial resembles Peter’s denial of Christ, driving home the principle of Matthew 25 that kindness or indifference to the poor carries moral or ethical weight.

And, not surprisingly, Melville finds American Christianity wanting on the question of morality.

The narrator would not follow Bartleby to the prison house if he were not consumed with guilt. He would not meditate on the book of Job in his reference to Bartleby’s death if he felt that this miserable scrivener’s plight were not somehow the plight of all. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!,” the elegiac punch line of the story, suggests that Bartleby’s death has archetypal significance.

What is the meaning of the closing line? It may invite readers to consider death as an equalizer that carries everyone back to the earth, which William Cullen Bryant styles as “the great tomb of man.” Certainly the narrator’s reference to “kings and counsellors” as Bartleby’s companions indicates as much. But the notion of dead letters is perhaps the most sobering theme in the conclusion. The narrator extends Bartleby’s former occupation in the “Dead Letter Office” to the profession of writing itself in his sad acknowledgement that ”[o]n errands of life, these letters speed to death.” The writer might be speaking into the void, as Parson Hooper was preaching to a sea of terrified faces that refused to hear his message or take it to heart.

And the narrator, after all of his legalistic moralizing, realizes that he will join Bartleby. They are both “sons of Adam,” not only the in Calvinistic sense of depravity, but also as mortals who must face a bitter end. The narrator will reap what he has sown, and what he has done to Bartleby will be done to him, which is the reason why he trembles as he denies any knowledge of or responsibility for the ”forlornest of mankind.”