American Romanticism
Prof. Bruce Harvey

SEVEN INTERPRETATIONS OF BARTLEBY'S CHARACTER

*** A General Tip about Being an English Major or Liking Literature: The more you study it the appeal is not just whether a story is a "good" read, but also sorting through the interpretive possibilities.  Analysis can give you a headache, or seem boring, only if you get too preoccupied with correctness.  Part of the fun is seeing how much you can "get" out of a story, but then to realize that what you "get" is indefinite.  The true, rare pleasure of Romanticism is the tease of meaning, the possibility of sublimity, with the full knowledge of the more existential vacuity of it all. Literary interpretation--with its depths--can be a substitute religion.   --thus saith the professor!

1) Political: refuses to live alienated life of worker and uses tool of the powerless—passive resistance

2) Economic robot: doesn't seem to be aware of #1 (?), but perhaps tedious work internalized such that he becomes almost an automaton with no "self" or "life force" (no appetite)

3) Negative Emersonian autonomy: B's non-sociality or solipsism/autism = transcendentalist inward-looking without Idealism

4) Crazy: Melville's family thought Herman might be!

5) Dead Letter Office:
--image of failed charity/ failed acts of intimacy/ failure of communication
--B. becomes like a "dead letter": a text that has no meaning, no longer part of the human circuit of communication
--pun on "I like to be stationary"

6) Narrator the real focus:
--complacent, non-confrontational (screen: allows for control via voice without face-to-face contact)
--B. forces him to stir the shallow water of his conscience
--perhaps he peeks into the depths (doesn't want to go to Church where simple or conventional solace for pain will be given): "Ah B., ah humanity"
--or, perhaps B. ultimately just a literary commodity, a strange eccentric figure to tell a story about
--don't we indulge ourselves a bit when we commiserate/express empathy for others' sorrow?
--even our acts of charity/love never, as it were, transcend their origin in our selfish need to feel good: they, like the letters in the Dead Letter Office, never reach their destination

7) An enigma:
--Melville obsessed by the unfathomable
--example: Moby Dick is a quest for vengeance, but also for meaning (Melville compares criss-crossed lines on whale's vast forehead to Egyptian hieroglyphics)