Bartleby: Man, Ghost, or Projection
The narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a very complex man. We learn about him bit by bit throughout the story, hearing that he is the Master in Chancery, he is “rather elderly”(265), and he is a name-dropper. Throughout the work, there are hints about the narrator’s character shown only in the way he deals with his employees, the most significant being Bartleby. Although a reader of “Bartleby the Scrivener” may think that Bartleby is a ghostly character, it can be gathered that he is a projection by the narrator. This projection is a characterization of the narrator’s passivity and desire for an easy life. Throughout the story, the hints at this begin to build and by the end, it is hard to accept that Bartleby is really just a passive man who used to work for the narrator.…show more content… The narrator mentions that concerning Bartleby “...nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources...What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him...” (265) This section seems odd because it suggests that the only person who really connected with Bartleby his whole life was the narrator. How could this be? With a normal person, they could interact with tens to hundreds of people in a single day. If Bartleby were a normal man, it would not make logical sense that the narrator was the only person to know anything about Bartleby’s life. It would be easy to write this off as the narrator being a bit big-headed, saying these things as a way to take credit for being the only source of information regarding Bartleby. This would be even easier if that were the only time the narrator gave away pieces of the truth about