My Brother's Keeper by Lea

In such bleak economic times, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall-Street” speaks to contemporary society on many different levels. Bartleby, a figure of inarticulate despair in the firm of a financially successful Wall Street lawyer, forces readers to asks themselves, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It is a question we are asking ourselves as a nation as we deliberate what industry to bail out next, how much to help families in danger of foreclosure, and how to balance need for increased aid to the poor with declining state and local revenues. Melville’s story compels us to ask ourselves how much should we help--and to feel uncomfortable with the answer.

The narrator of the story, a complacent, self-satisfied wealthy lawyer, thinks of his workers as assets or possessions, not as human beings. Each of his workers has flaws, but the lawyer says of Turkey, “Nevertheless he was in many ways a most valuable person to me” (2365), and of Nippers, “a very useful man to me” (2366), and calls Bartleby, “a valuable acquisition” (2373). It is only when Bartleby ceases to be a valuable commodity, when he not only does no work but also begins to diminish the professional reputation of the lawyer, that the lawyer decides to take some decisive action to get rid of Bartleby. The narrator says, “At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much” (2382). Similarly we would rather as a society think in generalities about the people who are losing their homes or the auto workers who have lost their jobs. If they are just numbers and not individuals, we do not feel the same responsibility to help them.

The lawyer shifts uneasily between moments when he cannot help but recognize Bartleby’s humanity and feel compassion and other times when he rationalizes ways to deny Bartleby’s claim on his sympathy. The lawyer notes that Bartleby makes him feel “overpowering stinging melancholy. . . The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam” (2375). But his compassion is short lived: “but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion” (2376). He rationalizes his feeling to make himself feel better, but what he’s really saying is that Bartleby depresses him, and he would rather not think about other people’s sorrow too deeply. Like St. Peter denying Christ, the lawyer tells the new tenants of his old office that Bartleby “ is nothing to me—he is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold me responsible for him” (2384). In a similar way, we move between feeling compassion for people and condemning them for taking on mortgages they could not afford or investing in hedge funds that promised unsustainable profits.

When, in the end the narrator is driven to do what he should have done in the first place—invite Bartleby to his home—Bartleby responds that he would prefer not to partake of his charity. The lawyer’s dilemma is a small-scale image of the tough decisions our country will face as we try to drag ourselves out of this recession. Durham County Manager Mike Ruffin has already proposed a $3 cut in the Durham Public Schools budget. What is our responsibility to the children of Durham? How will we reform the financial sector, the auto industry, the housing industry without causing undue pain to people affected by the transformation? How will we meet increased demands on our charity in a time when everyone has less to give? Melville does not give us any easy answers. His lawyer is like all of us: he likes to think of himself as a good person, but he does not want to be put to a lot of trouble to be one. Self-interest is his motivator, as is ours, and Melville’s take on human nature is that we’ll always serve ourselves first.

Works Cited
Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street." Norton Anthology of American Literature.Ed. Nina Baym. Vol. A. New York: Norton, 2007. 2363-89.