Bartleby A Transcendentalist

The transcendentalist ideas that are present in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” are those that truth can be found but it outside of one’s own personal thoughts. These truths can be found within nature which promotes personal revelations for these truths to present themselves. The “truth’s” that are found in nature allow for the individual’s spirit to be awakened. An important piece was that these truths stress the importance of feeling deeply and being intoned with one’s emotions. The truth allows the authentic self to be revealed. These transcendentalist ideas are found in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In Melville’s story the main character, Bartleby, is not accepted in society after he denies to follow the ways of capitalism and the

He first denies the task and then he starts refusing to do any work. During Bartleby’s stand to not do any work the lawyer comes back to the office on the weekend and finds that Bartleby lives in the office. The lawyers had these thoughts towards Bartleby, “his poverty is great, but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra, and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of weekdays hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home, sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous – a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage” (pg. 1495). This solitude that the lawyer talks about Bartleby is something that transcendentalists believe in. There is a revelation found about oneself when they are able to live in a world outside of the norm and for Bartleby that would be exactly what he decided to be when refusing to do any work for the lawyer. After asking Bartleby multiple times to leave since he will not do work the lawyer decided to move his practice to another office

Bartleby just sits in his chair and stares out the window at the blank wall. The layout of the office did not promote freeness either. Bartleby did not leave the office space either and was left by his coworkers in his solitude. The location of the office is an important piece of information since even though there was a window and it was located on the second floor you could not see anything but a wall. The lawyer himself admits that the conditions of the office space were not ideal and ““this view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life’” (Melville 1484). The wall could be figurative meaning that there is no outside world for the workers and that they would be doing their work endlessly which could promote the solitude. In this solitude, Bartleby may have been rejecting the societal norms but accepting his authentic self in the process. He could have been using this time of solitude to find a better world than the one found in reality. This is a key piece of transcendentalist finding the truth within one’s