A Panorama of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
By Jason Novak
The Paris Review articles - March 29, 2012
Bartleby is a law clerk on Wall Street who
one day refuses a demand from his startled boss with the words “I’d prefer not
to.” Over time, he prefers to do less and less, confounding the lawyer, until
at last he is taken to prison, where he refuses to eat. At the end of the
story, we learn that Bartleby worked in the Dead Letter Office, burning
people’s unclaimed letters.
I drew this as a break from struggling
with a larger piece I’ve been working on, so I was amused to learn that
Melville wrote “Bartleby” while struggling with Moby
Dick. Indeed, some of the details in this story are reminiscent of
Melville’s sea fiction: there are no women; the world outside Bartleby’s office
is murky, like the sea; he stares out the window at a brick wall for hours on
end, like a weary mariner gazing at an endless horizon. The prevailing tone is
one of destruction, so I used the flame from my kitchen stove to burn the
bottom edge of the panel.
Jason Novak works at a
grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
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