The Narrator's Dilemma in "Bartleby the Scrivener": The Excellently Illustrated Re-Statement of a Problem (1997)

For me seems more the excellently illustrated re-statement of problem, than the solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible human solutions), therefore may help the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be wholly without use. (Pierre 210) After the critical and financial ruin of Pierre in 1852, Herman Melville, according Frederick Busch, was most certainly concerned with the financial support of his family. As Busch puts it: support was threatened, and since money is letter from the world an author about his work, Melville had face up the prospect of not getting across his doubting dark vision (vii). But, even with these very worldly concerns troubling him, Melville would not compromise his work. When Putnam's magazine invited him contribute, he in return gave them story that continued work out themes that had been misunderstood in Pierre. These ambiguous themes have led deluge of interpretations that too often present themselves as moralistic judgments either for or against and the narrator of his story. As Walter E. Anderson has pointed out: story's interpretation crucially depends upon the attitudes taken towards both the lawyer and Bartleby (384). The very structure of the story, its narrative technique, leads the reader toward this kind of interpretation, and, most certainly, we have been given wealth of criticism that has taken this path. I think the greater challenge, however, is examine what the story itself tells us about and the narrator, resist the damning judgments toward which Melville seems coerce. I agree with Liane Norman's contention that the story insists on the reader's implication in puzzling, disturbing, and even accusing experience, that the reader is both participant and judge (22). Yet this kind of participation and the judgments that inevitably follow seem tell readers more about their own individual struggles than the struggles of the lawyer in Bartleby. The reader is always an accomplice in the creation of literary character. Jonathan Culler, in Structuralist Poetics, explains that the writer of story gives the reader a variety of descriptions of some posited individual, together with descriptions--implicit or explicit--of that individual's actions and reactions (230). These normally suffice lead most readers to conceive of person of whom these references and insights are just glimpses (230). With our task decipher and, along with Melville, create character is made more difficult because every word in the story is told us by the lawyer. If we are understand or Nippers or Turkey or Ginger Nut or even the lawyer himself, we may so only through the words of the lawyer. All actions, all dialogue, all statements, all interpretations come the reader through the report of the lawyer. Therefore, if we contend we know anything of Bartleby, is only what the narrator knows of Bartleby, and if we are have any insight into the narrator, must be through the examination of his own words. Thus, critics look the authenticity of the lawyer's speech: What does he unknowingly reveal about himself?. This question presupposes that the lawyer is somehow knowingly duplicitous, that in the course of the story we might be able catch him in compromising statement. But I would contend that any information that we garner that might blemish the character of the lawyer is given knowingly by the lawyer himself. In The Silence of Bartleby, Dan McCall has argued persuasively that most critics do not so much interpret the story as oppose the narrator's version their idea of the `truth' (103). He explains, It is as if `Bartleby, The Scrivener' is not story, is lie, and we should examine that lie, find inconsistencies and contradictions in it (102-03). …