earticle

영어

This paper attempts to interpret Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” by focusing on the story's “sequel” and the dead letter it introduces. The sequel has been criticized by many critics as meaningless at best, but some suggest the dead letter (or the Dead Letter Office) as a critical clue to understand the story. This paper presents Bartleby as the dead letter to the lawyer, the narrator and employer of Bartleby. Based on recent research on the laid-offs, this paper attempts to reconstruct what Bartleby experienced psychologically when he appear in the narrator’s office. The research suggests he had trouble establishing a trust toward his boss and that he had a certain level of cynicism. By showing that Bartleby rejects the social values of his time and by comparing other writings on the dead letters with “Bartleby”, it argues that he is a message of the pre-industrial era delivered to the narrator who actively participates the main current of industrialization. The narrator, who senses something in Bartleby, is, in the end, unable to read and understand the message because he is already “dead” to the values of the previous era. Bartleby becomes a dead letter because the recipient is dead. The last line of the story, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” shows the narrator’s regretful realization of the meaning of Bartleby, but his realization comes too late.