Blog Post 1, Topic #2

I don’t think Bartleby’s behavior was a reasonable response for his circumstances. I think although he could have been effected from his previous job as a “subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington,” I don’t believe it should have caused him to act like that towards people that wanted to help him like the narrator did. You can make the argument that Bartleby was too far damaged and he was going to be that way for the rest of his life but to me I don’t think it had to be.

            Bartleby seemed defeated with what life threw at him. All we know about him is what we find out in the end, that he was someone who sorted letters that never arrived at their destination. Other than that, there is no backstory to Bartleby or why he’s so strange. We just know what he keeps saying, “I would prefer not to” and we just see him as stubborn and rebellious. Throughout the whole first 26 pages we don’t know anything else but his behavior and what the narrator says about him. When we finally find out about his former job, we are kind of steered to feel bad and justify his behavior. The narrator compares the “dead letters” that Bartleby had to deal with in his previous job to “dead men” and claims that that is why Bartleby is the way he is, “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?” The narrator is implying that the emptiness that Bartleby exhibits reflects the unrealized potential of the “dead letters” that were sent with love, hope, and all other emotions that could come with letters. It seemed that after that job, he lost hope and just waited to die, “On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” The letters job affected him so deeply, that he was never the same. Or we could argue that’s just how he has always been. Since we don’t really know anything but what we learned at the end, we can only assume that that is why he was the way he was.

If I were to use a theory to better understand Bartleby, I think I would use the reader-response theory. Although, with that theory, we would have to make a lot of assumptions from what we know about Bartleby and the behaviors he shows us. So with the reader response theory we fill in the gaps from his behavior and we assume he has lost his purpose and he isn’t easy to pull out of this depression that he’s in.

            I don’t believe Bartleby’s actions and behavior was a very reasonable response to his circumstances. From what I understand, Bartleby was defeated from his previous job and clings onto the narrator for hope. “I had never before experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy.” Even the narrator feels a connection but there was only so much he could do to help Bartleby. If Bartleby would have held on to that connection and moved on from his circumstances he could have changed his end. He was unreasonable to treat the narrator, who seemed to be intrigued and interested in helping him, with such, I guess you can say, disrespect.