40 pages • 1 hour read
Bartleby, the Scrivener
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Symbols & Motifs
Brick Walls
In both environments Bartleby inhabits, the office and the prison, he finds a “dead brick wall” to stare at in “revery” (18). The narrator contrasts the brick wall outside of his office windows with the sweeping views of nature that might otherwise be there. Like the office, the brick wall is sterile and dead. Bartleby’s only known habit aside from work is to stare at these walls and dream, although the narrator does not know what he dreams about. Brick walls are often dead ends, a symbol in keeping with the deterministic philosophy at the heart of “Bartleby.” If human behavior is determined by outside forces, then no behavior is less rational or natural than any other.
Bartleby’s Screen
The folding screen the narrator brings into his office to section off Bartleby for the narrator’s privacy demarcates Bartleby’s “hermitage.” Though Bartleby is homeless, this metaphor of a secluded home is consistently used to refer to his tiny office space. For Bartleby, his place of work and his place of residence collapse into one, symbolized by his folding screen hermitage. Bartleby is not afforded the luxury of separating work and home. Melville here employs the device of contrast and metaphor; Bartleby’s hermitage is not literally a hermitage, but this term draws attention to the precious little privacy it affords him in the public atmosphere of the workplace.
The Phrase “Prefer Not To”
Bartleby’s reliance on the phrase “prefer not to” rather than “will not” is a motif expressing free will in the face of determinism. At no point does Bartleby actively resist anything he is forced to do. He quietly allows himself to be evicted from the office to the stairwell and then from the stairwell to the prison. In the context of philosophical texts arguing that human free will is nonexistent, Melville seems to initially suggest that these texts are correct. However, Bartleby’s passive yet rebellious behaviors perhaps express a kind of free will. Bartleby is repeatedly shown to be perfectly honest and completely harmless. These expressions of “preference” are not the “total depravity” of Calvinism but an expression of something else. Melville does not explicitly endorse the idea of free will, but scholars often point to Bartleby’s passive resistance as an expression of a freely-choosing soul.
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By Herman Melville
