Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” contains a prime example of an existentialist hero in its titular character Bartleby, who is hired to work for the narrator at the beginning of the story. Bartleby does not do much throughout the story, and it is this inaction that makes him the existentialist hero he is. As the narrator reveals in the final paragraphs of the story, Bartleby spent many years as a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, before being removed by a sudden change in the administration. Bartleby, “a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness…” spent years in a business perfect to heighten that hopelessness, the business of handling dead letters, only to be removed from this job (17). It can be gathered that through these years dealing with dead letters, Bartleby gained a very existential view of life and began to embrace absurdity as an existential hero. …show more content…
He approaches everything in his life doing only what he wants and when presented with a request to do something that does not go along with what he wants to do, he simply “[prefers] not to” (5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16). When he wishes to work, he works, “[gorging] himself on [the] documents,” (5), but when he has grown tired of this work, he states that he has “given up copying”(11). While anyone else may view this approach to life as ridiculous and absurd, the existentialist Bartleby embraces the absurdity and sees it as simply his way of living