This early Marxist criticism of 'Bartleby' has come under fire from several critics. Barnett's seminal essay 'Bartleby as Alienated Worker' (1974), in which, as the title suggests, Bartleby is the 'perfect exemplum' of Marx's alienated worker and Melville's story a parable of the heartlessness of capitalism. 4 This line of criticism began with Louise K. Nearly all current work on 'Bartleby' follows from another critical genealogy-not the occult but the quotidian, with one early reviewer going so far as to call the story 'a portrait from life.' 3 Marxist criticism of 'Bartleby,' in particular, takes its cue from this sense of the tale as a story of the everyday, casting it as a realistic story, with an emphasis on working life. 2 Yet for the most part, this sense of the story's weirdness has been lost.

One wrote of Bartleby's 'ghost-like taciturnity' another called the story a 'weird tale,' reminiscent of the eeriness of Poe. Contemporaneous reviewers certainly saw the story's occult possibilities. Yet the word appeared suggests a stranger possibility: perhaps Bartleby quite literally appeared, as would an apparition.īut what would it mean to take Melville at his word and read Bartleby as an apparition? We would be reminded of what current critics of the story seem to have forgotten: Bartleby is strange.

Bartleby's appearance, of course, creates a subtle, dramatic tension, setting up the eventual climax in which he is shown to be quite different from the person he first appears to be.

Bartleby, however, does not appear before the lawyer but, in a crucial change of prepositions, to him. We might read the word appeared as the diction of a man who has practiced law for many years, a profession in which the presence of individuals is often referred to as an 'appearance.' Yet in legal phraseology the verb to appear is typically followed by the preposition before: one always appears before the bench, the judge, or the jury. Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me,' writes the lawyer in Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' (1853), 'it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employés, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings.' 1 Intriguingly, the lawyer does not say he met Bartleby instead, Bartleby 'appeared' to him.

Bartleby the scrivener cliff notes