When Herman Melville wrote the short story Bartleby, the Scrivener in 1853, he was writing it under the influence of his own personal gloom, caused by the fact that his great novel, Moby-Dick, was not selling as well as he expected it to be. This sad situation is reflected fully in one of his less known pieces of fiction, Bartleby, the Scrivener, a shorter story, who ends on a gloomy note worthy enough to rival Edgar Allan Poe's. Yet there is also a different side to this short story, that of humour in general and the dark kind of humour in particular (as well as dramatic irony) in the short story of Bartleby, the Scrivener, where Melville blended both comic and tragic to achieve the eventual poignancy of the story for which it is recognized.
The first time we see the flash of the presence of the less obvious, non-tragic story genres in the story is practically at the story's very beginning, when the narrator is describing his first employees with a rather gentle sarcasm:
Turkey was a short, pursy Englishman of about my own age, that is, somewhere not far from sixty. In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o'clock, meridian--his dinner hour--it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing--but, as it were, with a gradual wane--till 6 o'clock, P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory. There are many singular coincidences I have known in the course of my life, not the least among which was the fact, that exactly when Turkey displayed his fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just then, too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I considered his business capacities as seriously disturbed for the remainder of the twenty-four hours. Not that he was absolutely idle, or averse to business then; far from it. The difficulty was that he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He would be incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand. All his blots upon my documents, were dropped there after twelve o'clock, meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and sadly given to making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went further, and was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with augmented blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on anthracite. He made an unpleasant racket with his chair; spilled his sand-box; in mending his pens, impatiently split them all to pieces, and threw them on the floor in a sudden passion; stood up and leaned over his table, boxing his papers about in a most indecorous manner, very sad to behold in an elderly man like him.
(Bartleby, the Scrivener, pg 1094)
The above citation shows as an example that at least initially - before the introduction of Bartleby - the story is not depressing or despondent; rather, it is narrated via a mixture of gentle sarcasm and humour about Turkey, and later on about Nippers and Ginger Nut, his other two underlings. The story's spiritual misery and gloom, which becomes rather thick in the end of the story, is absent at the beginning, as neither the old employees nor their employer possess that attitude of Bartleby, that gloom and despondency is something that Bartleby brings with him, due to personal reasons:
The report was this: 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. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?
(Bartleby, the Scrivener, pg 1118)
This `final report', essentially, shows the following things. Firstly, there are two geographical/social poles in the story: one at the beginning, located at the narrator's Wall Street office, without any gloom or death (in fact, the employees attitudes' are rather upbeat and optimistic, at least when compared to Bartleby's), and the other is at the end, at the dead letter office, where Bartleby used to work. When Bartleby moves away from his `pole' into the opposing one, does the interaction between the two poles start, albeit in a certain way, for character-wise, Bartleby simply does not fit in with his co-workers, nor does he try to. He does not fit into the atmosphere of the Wall Street office; the only way he can fit in is by making an effort - something that he prefers not to do.
The second point is that the penultimate paragraph of story reveals to the audience that the gentle sarcasm of the Wall Street office has infested Bartleby's pole just as Bartleby has infested the office, and it manifests in the very articulacy of the narrator, as he describes Bartleby's old job. Yes, working at a dead letter office is a very depressing job, yet to compare letters to people is a faulty comparison: the two are just unequal to each other. Moreover, to learn that Bartleby fell into an ever-deepening depression because of letters alters the aura of genuine tragedy, which surrounds Bartleby and his fate. After all, for the audience to learn that Bartleby had been just another clerk in another office who got depressed because of his job makes him a tragicomic, rather than a purely tragic, figure in their eyes instead.
Another way that Melville blends Bartleby's tragic situation with humour and irony is through Bartleby's interaction with the narrator. The scrivener's preference not to do more and more things brings to mind, at least initially, the question as to what would Bartleby have done, if the narrator, using his right as the boss, pushed the issue at least early in the story, and told Bartleby to do something or other whether he preferred it or not. Obviously, then the story's conflict would have escalated much sharply that in the original and would have been resolved much quicker too - but it does not happen. Bartleby may not fit in into his new job in the end, but initially it appears that he does - originally, his unwillingness does not seem to be too different from Turkey's drinking, or Nippers' attitude.
Yet this apparent though only initial fitting into the Wall Street office once more undercuts Bartleby's tragedy, for at least initially he appears to be just `peculiar', as the following dialogue demonstrates:
"Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this? Am I not right?"
"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I think that you are."
"Nippers," said I, "what do you think of it?"
"I think I should kick him out of the office."
(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being morning, Turkey's answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms, but Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous sentence, Nippers' ugly mood was on duty and Turkey's off.)
"Ginger Nut," said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, "what do you think of it?"
"I think, sir, he's a little luny," replied Ginger Nut with a grin.
"You hear what they say," said I, turning towards the screen, "come forth and do your duty."
(Bartleby, the Scrivener, pg. 1100)
Moreover, to further change Bartleby's tragedy into something less grand, "[b]ut once more business hurried me. I determined again to postpone the consideration of this dilemma to my future leisure" (1100). Thus, the start of Bartleby's tragedy is far from something grand - rather, it appears to be something almost irrelevant to the narrator, a minor inconvenience at best. Moreover, even though in the second part of the story this inconvenience does grow into a tragedy at last, for a while it seems to be as much a comic, as a tragic situation: a lazy employee is trying to have his non-confrontational employer to give him as little as possible of office work while still getting paid. This sort of a relationship, not too different from the interactions of the narrator with Turkey and Nippers, goes on for a while in the story, and once more alters the tragedy that eventually befalls Bartleby into a more comic situation via impromptu humour and sarcasm.
However, it must be also said that despite all of those comic elements, Bartleby, the Scrivener, does end in tragedy, the titular character does die, for whatever reasons of his own. Whether the reason of his death can be considered high or low, it is most definitely not comic: here is Bartleby's own pole, and thus the elements of his opposite - the Wall Street office - pretty much do not function or manifest here at all.
Yet, even when the tragic elements begin to truly take over the story, there is something absurdly humorous or ironic in the situation that the narrator finds himself, because of Bartleby's attitude of passive non-cooperation, despite the narrator's best intentions. Still, once more a reader might wonder - what would have happened, should the narrator have decided to force the issue? Never, throughout the story, does the narrator try to force the issue unless Bartleby forces him to - and being forced by Bartleby is both quite pathetic and quite ironic. However, as the story draws to a close, and the narrator's assistance to Bartleby comes too little too late, this irony becomes mocking, whatever humour there is, becomes definitely black. Moreover, the fact that the narrator, despite all of his self-depreciation never realizes that if he had forced the issue with Bartleby when their involvement was just beginning, the whole thing could have been avoided altogether, develops a derisive tone in the address of the narrator.
This, however, was the measure of Herman Melville's skill and talent as a literary author. He was able to blend easily tragic and comic, creating a very potent brew of the literary elements, fuelled, most likely, by his own situation in life, by his anxieties and apprehensions regarding Moby-Dick and other important elements in his life. He incorporated them all into the figures of the story's protagonists, Bartleby the scrivener and the narrator, as the latter tries to make sense of Bartleby, Bartleby's life and the disturbance that the latter brought into the narrator's own life.
Bibliography:
Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener." 1853. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2003. Pg. 1094, 1100, 1118.