How To Use This Discussion Guide

Materials Included | Begin by reading Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” on our site or in your copy of What So Proudly We Hail.

Materials for this guide include background information about the author and discussion questions to enhance your understanding and stimulate conversation about the story. In addition, the guide includes a series of short video discussions about the story, conducted by Wilfred McClay (University of Tennessee–Chattanooga) with the editors of the anthology. These seminars help capture the experience of high-level discourse as participants interact and elicit meaning from a classic American text. These videos are meant to raise additional questions and augment discussion, not replace it.

Learning Objectives | Students will be able to:

• Reflect on the need for the virtue of compassion and their own personal and civic attitudes towards their neighbors through reading Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener;”
• Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it;
• Cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text;
• Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development
• Summarize the key supporting details and ideas;
• Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text; and
• Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

Common Core State Standards Addressed | Literacy in History/Social Studies:

• RH.9-10.1, RH.9-10.2, RH.9-10.3, RH.11-12.1, RH.11-12.2, RH.11-12.4

English Language Arts:

• RL.9-10.1, RL.9-10.2, RL.9-10.3, RL.9-10.4, RL.9-10.9, RL.11-12.1, RL.11-12.3, RL.11-12.4, RL.11-12.5

Writing Prompts | Based on Common Core Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies:

• What do you think of the lawyer’s treatment of Bartleby? Is it commendable? Deplorable? Understandable? Or something else? Is there anything else the lawyer should have done? How would you act if you were in the lawyer’s place? After reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” write an essay that addresses the question and support your position with evidence from the text. Be sure to acknowledge competing views. (Argumentation/Analysis; Task 2)
• Why does Bartleby “prefer not to” perform more and more actions throughout the story? Does this say more about the nature of the work or more about the state of his soul? After reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” write an essay that addresses the question and support your position with evidence from the text. Be sure to acknowledge competing views. (Argumentation/Analysis; Task 2)
• Were you to meet a Bartleby, how would you behave? Would you try to “do something” for him? If so, what? Or would you try instead to “be there” with him? If so, how? Is there yet another way to deal with the sort of deep human difficulties that a man like Bartleby presents? After reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” write a narrative inserting yourself into the story, demonstrating how you would interact with Bartleby. (Narrative/Description; Task 27)

About the Author

Herman Melville (1819–91), today hailed as one of America’s greatest writers, had in his own time a very mixed career. Some of his early sea stories and sea adventures were esteemed by the public, but his epic (and to him, most significant) novel, Moby-Dick (1851), was very badly received. Indeed, after it appeared, Melville became something of a pariah in the literary world. Turning to poetry, he encountered similar neglect. In the last quarter-century of his life, he wrote little and published less. (Billy Budd, today regarded as one of his finest works, was published posthumously.) Friends feared for his sanity. His wife’s family tried not only to get her to leave him but also to have him committed as insane. He wound up working for nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York, and when he died, he seemed destined for obscurity. One might therefore wonder whether his tale about the mysterious Bartleby is, among other things, intended as a profoundly disheartening allegory about the artist’s—and his own—relation to our commercial, democratic society. But that, of course, depends on what you think the story says and means.

Summary

The basic plot is rather simple: a middling Wall Street lawyer—also the narrator of the story—needing more assistance, hires a new scrivener (copyist) to join his firm. Enter Bartleby. Although initially very productive in his copying, after three days he calmly refuses when asked to help with proofreading or any other office tasks: “I would prefer not to” is his reply, one repeated more than twenty times in the story. The lawyer and his other employees are shocked, but Bartleby holds fast: he prefers not to. Both touched and disconcerted yet choosing not to fire him, the lawyer is strangely drawn into coping with Bartleby and his growing refusals and eccentricities—the theme of the rest of the story.

Bartleby, we learn, is always in the office, either incessantly working or staring out the window at a facing wall. On a chance Sunday visit to the office, the lawyer discovers that Bartleby also lives there. Eventually Bartleby’s refusals extend also to his work as a copyist: he prefers not to do any work, yet he prefers not to quit the office. The lawyer, waffling between pity and indignation, finally asks him—bribes him—to leave, then later commands him to leave his office. But Bartleby prefers not to. Instead, the lawyer moves his office, leaving Bartleby behind.

Another lawyer moves into the building and quickly learns that Bartleby comes with the territory. He complains to the narrator, who disclaims any responsibility for him. The new proprietor has Bartleby arrested for vagrancy, and he is imprisoned in “the Tombs,” officially known as the Halls of Justice (33). There, too, he prefers not to, including “not to eat.” The narrator visits Bartleby but can’t get through to him. On his next visit, the narrator finds Bartleby lying dead, huddled against a wall in the prison yard.

At the very end, in a brief coda, the narrator informs us of a late-arriving rumor to the effect that Bartleby had previously worked as a clerk in an obscure branch of the Post Office known as the Dead Letter Office, sorting through undeliverable mail—mail that would have brought hoped-for news and gifts to people who died with their hopes unfulfilled.

Section Overview

Unlike its basic plot, the story’s meaning and implications are far from simple. So we will proceed slowly, starting with what we learn of the characters and then moving to the heart of the story, the relationship between Bartleby and the lawyer. We conclude this section by attending to the story’s short coda.

Section Overview

This story, like the others in What So Proudly We Hail, is, of course, interesting in itself. But, again like the others, it can also be read as a mirror in which we can see ourselves as human beings and as American citizens, and through which we can become more thoughtful about what our national and civic identity might mean and require. This story invites reflection, especially about our personal and civic attitudes toward our neighbors, about the need for the virtue of compassion and what it entails, and about the symbolic and literal meaning of “erecting walls” between ourselves and our neighbors. It also invites us to think about some of the implications of our American principles and ways.