Rereading the Postscript in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Abstract

In a move reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s maddening tendency to toss his famished readers a few crumbs of interpretive sustenance, Herman Melville offers his readers the tantalizing postscript in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After 15,000 words of not giving us what we are craving—namely, a satisfying clue to Bartleby’s identity or behavior—the narrator relates “one little item of rumor” (Melville 73) that might hold “a certain suggestive interest” (73). The morsel we are given is that “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration” (73). The scholarship devoted to the postscript has examined at length both the Dead Letter Office and the dead letters themselves. What seems to have gone unnoticed, however, is the significance of the “suddenly removed” part of this revelation. In what follows I argue that the postscript is of tremendous importance because the possibility of Bartleby’s being suddenly removed from his DLO job is the key to understanding his unusual behavior. Although the narrator downplays the DLO revelation with disclaimers, he acts on that information as if it were true. As such, it is fair for readers to treat this “rumor” as accurate biographical information. Thomas Mitchell says that “Bartleby ... reveals nothing about himself ” (330). He certainly reveals very little, but due to this sparsity what Bartleby does reveal is magnified. In his final office conversation with the narrator, Bartleby states simply, “I like to be stationary” (69). Because Bartleby tends to state things negatively, his naming a specific preference is noteworthy. The first thing the narrator says upon meeting Bartleby is “a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold” (45). He then offers a stream of observations that reinforce Bartleby’s stationary existence: “he never went anywhere” (50); “He was a perpetual sentry in the corner” (50); “Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery” (59); “Bartleby remained standing at the window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries” (64); “Bartleby would remain standing immovable in the middle of the room” (65), and so on. In addition to these observations, Bartleby’s own words express his desire https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205576