Delivering the Undeliverable: Bartleby as the Egyptian “Dumb I AM”

This essay examines the trajectory of the narrator’s efforts to understand Bartleby in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” focusing on the images of ancient Egypt. Drawing on Melville’s view of ancient Egypt expounded in his poem, “The Great Pyramid,” this essay contends that to the narrator, Bartleby is like the enigmatic pyramid that is all-powerful yet lifeless and blank. Through his failed attempts to investigate Bartleby from both outside and inside, the narrator learns that Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is an expression of the desire to just exist freed from constraints of time and space. Just like the pyramid, which is referred to as “this dumb I AM” in “The Great Pyramid,” Bartleby might be beyond human limitations, but he is “dumb.” Only after his physical contact with Bartleby, does the narrator recognize the possibility that Bartleby might have a voice and endeavors to bring him back into the loop of communication by delivering through his imagination the undeliverable letters in Bartleby’s Dead Letter Office.