Indeed, Borges pointed out that Melville’s story anticipates Kafka’s work in ‘the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling’. Indeed, with its emphasis on the symbolic activity of writing and the ways in which bureaucracy can imprison us into a passive and pointless existence, ‘Bartleby’ can be analysed as a forerunner to the works of twentieth-century writers like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. His determination to resist this demand will lead to selling fewer books in ‘Bartleby’, it will end with the scrivener losing his job and starving himself to death (like many a less successful author before).
The capitalist machine wants Melville to continue producing more formulaic works which would sell copies and make his publishers lots of money: the system wants to turn him into nothing more than a ‘scrivener’, of sorts. Herman Melville ‘preferred not to’ continue writing the sea stories which had proved hugely popular early in his career, preferring to branch out into more experimental and challenging fiction (including, most famously, Moby-Dick, published a couple of years before Melville wrote ‘Bartleby’ and greeted by a number of hostile and bewildered reviews). Bartleby stands out to the narrator because he pushes back against this urge to conform and comply.īecause a scrivener is a kind of writer, numerous critics have viewed Bartleby as an autobiographical portrait. The story’s setting on Wall Street, the financial centre of the United States, is no accident: the world of finance, law, and business, Melville appears to be suggesting, stifles and restricts the individual, turning everyone into mindless cogs in the machine of industry.Įven the job which appears in the story’s title, ‘scrivener’, involves not writing original content but merely copying existing documents. Alongside such passivity, we find, in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, the theme of conformity.
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