Blog 1 topic 2

After reading Bartleby’s story, I feel like his unusual behavior is not a reasonable response to his circumstances. Although we can feel the baldness and desperate atmosphere from the context, it is unfair to say that his circumstances is the critical reason that eventually led him to death.

Let’s take a look at other scriveners. It is hard to say that scrivener is a decent job, “turkey”, “nipper” and “ginger nut” all had their own difficulties: Turkey was both poor and rude, and he never cared about his appearance; nipper was “the victim of two evil powers——ambition and indigestion”; ginger nut was a twelve-year-old kid and had to do the job of cleaner and sweeper. Although these colleagues’ lives could not be called satisfying, “turkey”, “nipper” and “ginger net” never lived such a pale live as Bartleby did. In fact we can find that their behaviors were just like normal people. One thing different from Bartleby and his colleagues was that Bartleby chose to completely closed himself, instead other scriveners always liked to express their emotions to release pressure. Also despite their difficulties, Bartleby’s colleagues always know the way to make them happy: Nipper liked to drink wine and ginger nut liked to eat nuts. On the other hand, it looks like there is nothing to cheer Bartleby up.

There is a theory that people can be divided into two types of personalities, one is called extroverted personality, which means that this kind of people like to charge their “energy” by communicating with other people. The other type is called introverted personality; to this kind of people, communicating with others is a tiring work and will cause a large amount of energy; thus people with introverted personality would always like to avoid contact with others and prefer to stay in their own world. We can say that Bartleby was a typical introverted person, maybe the most introverted person; this can explain why he always resisted communicating with people work with him. According to the article, “...that he had declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world”. Actually comparing to introversion, Bartlyby was so extremely self-reclusive that he was more likely to have an autism. In either case, it is the inner nature that caused him to have a such miserable ending, not his circumstance.

In the end, the author told us that Bartlyby was once employed in a dead letter office in Washington and then suddenly removed. But I think this can not be the main reason that he chose to close himself. There are so many people in the world suffer everyday, but very few of them would choose to isolate themselves as much as Bartleby did. Thus I would say Bartleby’s behavior is not a reasonable response to his circumstances; With his extremely introverted personality, it is hard to say that in a different circumstance Bartleby would end up with a different outcome.