How Did Bartleby Survive

Bartleby’s apparent loss of appetite and subsequent refusal to eat at the end of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” causes his death. Bartleby’s relationship with food is used to govern oneself, or even to govern those around him. Bartleby, seemingly, is the only character given a name that is not strictly food related. Bartleby’s ingestion of only ginger-snaps then nothing at all is a form of passive resistance against the normality of life, however, more than passive resistance, Bartleby’s refusal to eat is a yet another example of his rejection of expectation. Bartleby’s desire to eat and desire to work exist closely together, as both food and work exist under the plane of things ‘needed’ to exist under the capitalist

Melville writes, “…the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience... I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition” (Melville ##). The idea of food here is negative, as the narrator uses the food imagery to his own benefit, with terms such as, ‘delicious self-approval’ and ‘sweet morsel for my conscience.’ The food language depicts the narrator in a negative light, though the narrator is perhaps sympathetic to Bartleby’s case, the narrator is interested only in what his helping Bartleby will do for his own ‘salvation.’ While Bartleby’s refusal to work and refusal to eat grow deeper, the narrator’s indulgence in his own idea expectation of Bartleby grows. Though not as explicit, the narrator exclaims he felt ‘goaded’ on to antagonize Bartleby into some different reaction than his expected preference not to. Though ‘goading’ in this sentence is used as a verb, as into incite someone or something, goad is also used as a noun, as an object that is used to drive cattle or other types of farm animals, presumably to slaughter and then consumption. The idea of goading places Bartleby in the framework of being a sort of animal that the narrator is driving to ‘slaughter.’ Bartleby becomes the food that the narrator so willfully describes, attempts to feed to Bartleby only for him to deny it. The image of Bartleby becoming something non-human and animal-like is important, as it implies that the narrator does not see view Bartleby as particularly human, as Bartleby does not exhibit traits that are standarzied with ‘human,’