Virtual Intercourse: A Scrivener's Experience in the Non-Being Starting with the narrator's claim that he was going to relate a story about Bartleby, "the strangest [scrivener] I ever saw or heard of," Melville begins a juxtaposition where everything but Bartleby is discussed in some detail. The resulting circumvention causes Bartleby to be discussed more as a causal force than as a human. While the narrator admits he has limited information about Bartleby, he makes little …
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…story that the author believes the narrator had a larger duty to aid Bartleby than he exhibited. The tragic nature of the story's end, where the narrator comes back to visit Bartleby a mere 20 minutes after he has passed on, brings closure to Melville's point that our individual responsibility to our fellow man cannot be taken lightly or just occasionally on a whim when it might seem convenient. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography** Herman Melville_Bartleby the Scrivener