Bartleby

I am glad I finally got around to Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” This is one of the many novellas I selected to hit my Goodreads reading target in the year of COVID. Who can't get to their target when there should be more time for reading? Me, apparently.

Enter Bartleby. I am still thinking about this book, which means it likely deserves more three stars. As someone who is an accountant by day, I am very attuned to how dull and repetitive some day jobs can be.

I was lucky that my first boss, a partner at a CPA firm I worked for right out of college, told me that accounting can be an art. He was not referring to the illegal, your creative, accounting that Enron is well known for. What he meant is that I should look at each job as a way to challenge myself and find better and better ways to serve our clients. I have taken this advice to heart, which has led to a lot of different career choices. Why am I going to all this personal detail?

Because the job of a scrivener, or copyist, is not all that far from a bookkeeper. You do many tasks over and over and, in the days before computers, had to have pretty decent handwriting.

If, one day I were simply to tell any one of my bosses: “I prefer not to,“ I would have been sacked immediately. And, to be fair I would wish to sack an employee of mine if they were to respond seriously in this manner and not proceed with the request I had made.

This little novella, which was Melville‘s last, is an interesting exploration of office life. One wonders how much of this was inspired by Melville‘s disgust with being asked to produce hit after hit, instead of doing the art he truly wish to. The narrator is also an interesting character. He vacillates from frustration to anger to concern to paternalism and back again. Is the narrator intended to represent the good side of capitalism, because he never actually throws Bartleby out on his ear or, is the joke that we can't really take care of those who simply wish not to be? I still have many thoughts about this book, but simply cannot crystallized at all. I can't say it's worth reading this very short work and not just because you're trying to hit a reading goal for the year..