AN OPINION ABOUT THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER
Rubén Balaguer Fayos
Universitat de València
What we see in "Bartleby" is the narrator's metamorphosis, from biographer-historian into poet-dramatist. Bartleby draws the narrator from a rationalist point of view toward a more skillful way of speaking.
The first-person narrative technique establishes the primacy of language over material reality. The "truth" of "Bartleby" is only the product of the lawyer's cognitive and linguistic habits. Although he insists upon the veracity of his own version of the scrivener, classifying it as biography, the lawyer says at the start, "What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him". After Bartleby's death, language is the only medium through which Bartleby can be resurrected. Bartleby means, finally, only what this man's language can make him mean. The attorney knows of Bartleby only what he can say of him; and he cannot be presumed to understand what he cannot put into language. Since Melville's narrator is a man for whom language is the main way of controlling the world, he pursues literal rather than "poetic" truth. He offers not a poetic meditation on Bartleby but a "biography."
Bartleby's first refusal to copy a document strikes the narrator. Instantly, he is "turned into a pillar of salt, standing at the head of [his] seated column of clerks". With the single word "prefer" stating the implication of "preference" rather than "assumption," the language of poetry rather than law, Bartleby infiltrates the narrator's language and produces a transformation of mind as well as speech. As the narrator's rhetoric is transformed from deductive to analogic, developing toward the Dead Letter envoy and the final utterance (Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!), he inevitably perceives Bartleby less as a material (that is, an obstinate clerk who refuses to do his job) and more as a symbolic presence. The narrator is forced to see and feel rather than think.
Judging from what the narrator-attorney experiences in "Bartleby," I might conclude that it is precisely the transference of all value to the verbal system, this putting the world "under the mind for verb and noun," that shapes "Bartleby." Indeed, the narrator's penetration of Bartleby's depths, his eleventh-hour comprehension of Bartleby as a figure for all doomed humanity, emphatically reminds us that in this story, more so than in others, there are only words.
References:
-Melville, Herman, Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853).
-Cohen, Tom. The Letters of the Law: 'Bartleby' as hypogrammatic romance. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
-Jacobs, Richard. Melville's 'Bartleby': The Crisis of Interpretation. London: Routledge, 2001.
NARRATIVE TONE AND PATTERN IN OIL OF DOG
Rubén Balaguer Fayos
Universitat de València
Taking into account the main theme of Bierce’s story –murder of both dogs and babies to make an economic profit- we could never imagine that it would be narrated in such an ironic way, pushing the plot towards a sarcastic and rather humorous tone.
The first-person narrator establishes himself as an innocent voice completely devoid of any shame. He incredibly considers his parents as “honest”. Obviously, we can’t compare in a moral spectrum both kinds of job-crimes, but surprisingly so does Boffer Bings, hiding any kind of self-consciousness despite his innocent complicity.
The action moves to an even more perverse situation when Bings helps his mother carry on with her job by throwing a babe’s dead corpse into his father’s oil cauldron. The amazing tone is as follows: “...and as I looked upon this cherub I could almost find it in my heart to wish that the small, red wound upon its breast –the work of my beloved mother- had not been mortal”. It seems that the narrator even boasts about his mother’s ‘business’, seeing the whole thing as a mere profession, a way of earning a living. However, Bings’s unconscious self-guilt appears to pop up and says: “In short, I took the first step in crime and brought myself untold sorrow by casting the babe into the cauldron”.
The narrative pattern now adopts a new dimension when Bings’s parents discover that the combination of both industries is an advantage they must consider. Even so, the aberrant sarcasm cannot be ripped off the narrator’s tone: “The holy influence of my dear mother was ever about me to protect me from the temptations which beset youth, and my father was a deacon in the church”. Therefore, we can perceive a dycotomy between a public, formal appearance and a private, horrible reality.
The ultimate squeezing of the story is raccounted when Bings’s parents decide to kill not only babes, but also adults. When this is found out, the social reaction against it is strikingly bland: “It was intimated by the chairman that any further raids upon the population would be met in a spirit of hostility”. So now society is also somewhat an accomplice of the crimes, not stopping them all at once. And at the very end, the tone still sticks to the general set: “...these memoirs are written with a heart full of remorse for a heedless act entailing so dismal a commercial disaster”. Again, the narrator’s view make us acknowledge his self-guilt, but remains fully materialistic, wholly sarcastic, deeply ironic, free from any moral sin or legal judgment.
References:
-Bierce, Ambrose. Oil of Dog (1909).
-Berkove, Lawrence. A Prescription for Adversity: The Moral Art of Ambrose Bierce. Ohio State University Press, 2002.