Boundless Despair as the Way to Salvation: Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Abstract

This essay discusses Melville’s view of “prudence” and “charity” in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the moral virtues originating from Classical humanism and Christianity. The narrator’s predicament of helping Bartleby in the story exposes his flawed conceptualization of prudence and charity whose meaning underwent a significant change during nineteenth-century America. The narrator’s blindness to the truth behind Bartleby’s dejection proves his lack of prudence, which in Classical humanism means the moral force to see through the surface appearances, according to Dosia Reichardt (43). His material notion of charity, in accordance with the market logic and Adam Smith’s moral economy, also contradicts the biblical sense of charity as boundless love with no earthly payback possible. His incomprehension of prudence and charity in their true meaning cripples his endeavor to reach Bartleby’s “soul” (22). Yet, his affective investment in Bartleby pays in the end through his own spiritual salvation, ironically done in loss and not by gains. Consequently, the story’s ending, called “the sequel,” completes the narrative design to emphasize the narrator’s awakening to the truth that he has not been a benefactor but a beneficiary of charity, bequeathed by Bartleby through suffering and despair.