Choose one of the following questions and comment on it in the box below:
1. What symbolic undertones can be ascribed to the wall and how do these relate to the different types of walls we find in the text?
2. Characterize the narrator as character, from what he tells and shows about himself, and/or compare his struggles with his conscience with those of Huckleberry Finn.
3. How do you interpret the last sentence of the text?
1 comment:
3)
At the end of the story, the narrator learns that Bartleby used to work in a Dead Letter Office, where his job, as a subordinate clerk, was to sort undeliverable letters, removing important content before they were burnt (“Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington.”). This is the only personal detail revealed about the catatonic man, but it clues the narrator to the entirety of Bartleby’s odd and unresponsive behavior, a probable result of the overwhelming nature of his former job. The continuous contact with letters written to dead men, the narrator speculates, turned Bartleby into “a very ghost,” living hand-to-hand with death. Now, his recurrent “dead-wall reveries”, symbolizing isolation, finally make sense, since Bartleby desired to isolate himself from all existence - to quote Ellen Watkins, he “hailed the coming of death’s angel as the footsteps of a welcome friend.”
Finally, the narrator pictures all the hardships and hopelessness his employee once suffered and that made him an alienated man, passively awaiting death - which is why he died by starvation and not active suicidal: “he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers anymore; pardon for those who died despairing.” The lawyer even comes to imagine that, inside a letter Bartleby once opened, there was a wedding ring meant for someone who “moulders in the grave.”
The ending sentence, therefore, is firstly an empathetic exclamation towards Bartleby, who pained so much that, like the dead letters, he turned into an emotionally detached dead man too: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?” Then, realizing Bartleby is a microcosm of an immensity of people, the narrator empathizes with all “humanity.” The repetition of “Ah” is, hence, basically a “I can only imagine what you have been through!” One could also infer that, as Bartleby’s employer, and given the narrator’s struggle with the extent of his responsibility for him, the final sentence might be a confession of guilt over Bartleby’s death, whom he feels was tasked with saving.
An interesting correlation between the scrivener’s uncommunicative personality and his job at Washington is that he was tasked with destroying letters, language, thus metaphorically killing his own language and reducing it to the mere apathy of “I would prefer not to.”
Matias Castiel
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