Duty and Change in Melville’s Bartleby

Natural philosophers of every century of human existence have asked what we owe to each other, society or government. In The Origin of Civil Society, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the only natural form of duty is to one’s family, and all other obligations are based on agreement (57). Henry David Thoreau, in 1849, wrote in Resistance to Civil Government (sometimes known as Civil Disobedience), “it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support” (143). This sort of conflict, which has accompanied all men at the great changes in society, is what drives conflict in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Melville, like the Byzantine architects, crafts a work of art that studies a microcosm of the macrocosm. That is to say, by looking at the relationship between two people, Melville is able to explore the larger context around them, specifically the radical change of society in the mid-19th century. Like Thoreau, Bartleby’s famous word, “I would prefer not to,” send a shockwave through contemporary expectations and give rise to how a person approaches a situation. Bartleby and Thoreau are both transcendentalists, and look to return to a Rousseauian state of nature. They have both arrived there after a journey of self-examination – most definitely in Thoreau’s case, and most probably in Bartleby’s – and their non-conformist attitudes raise questions of what is expected of people with regard to their duty to society and each other. Bartleby in particular makes the nameless...

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...say that Bartleby did nothing, but passive resistance is a powerful tool, whereby laws have been changed and governments have topped. Thoreau wrote “[a] man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong [emphasis in original]” (145). Bartleby, by following in the transcendentalist’s footsteps, does nothing, and makes a profound statement by it.

Perhaps it was fated that Bartleby must die in the manner he did. After all, the narrator consulted the eminent pre-destination theologians Priestley and Edwards, and admits to believing that Bartleby’s presence “had been all predestinated from eternity” and that “it was not for a mere mortal like [the narrator] to fathom” (167). Accepting the idea that Bartleby is a microcosm of the macrocosm, this would imply that change is inevitable.