16:19-17:15

Again I have chosen a video by Nick Courtright, but for the reason that his explanations of the text are comprehensive. In the section of the video that I chose, Courtright talks about the short appendix at the end where the narrator mentions that Bartleby may have worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington before working as a scrivener for the narrator. The Dead Letter Office was where all the letters that could not be delivered went, whether the receiver had passed away or could not be found. The name “Dead Letter Office” itself sounds very morbid; I don’t think I would be happy working in a place with a name like that — and then to be fired as well! In that sense, I think that we all understand Bartleby a little more and why he was so depressed and lost all will to live at the end when we learn of this rumor about him.

Courtright said that perhaps we are all dead letters. We are all going to end up in the same place in the end; so what is the point of life then? We are going nowhere, and Bartleby may have made this connection when he was working in the Dead Letter Office, seeing all those letters hit a dead end, never being able to go to where they were meant to go, messages going undelivered and unheard. Bartleby must have become so depressed and so unsatisfied with life. Although he was young, his job was of low status and there may have been little to no social/professional upward mobility. Even if he was able to move up in the world, what would he do when he got to a higher point? It seemed like Bartleby didn’t have any family or friends either, as he lived in the office and rarely went outside. What would he do with the extra money he made? There was no one to give it to or to spend it on. He couldn’t see a point in working or making a living or in capitalist society in general. Everyone else could not understand Bartleby because they were so used to having a job to make money to provide for themselves and, probably, a family, and they didn’t see any other way of living or maybe had never thought about why they were doing the things they were doing. The last sentence of the story, “On errands of life, these letters speed to death,” shows the irony of the dead letters, and perhaps why Bartleby doesn’t see a point in living. These letters had a message to deliver, full of life, but in the end they just died in the flames of the Dead Letter Office.