The Narrator’s Self-Justifying Rhetoric in Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street

This study explores “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” by Herman Melville (1853), employing the lens of defamiliarization to accentuate the narrator’s self-justifying rhetoric aimed at shaping the reader’s perceptionof events and deflecting blame in Bartleby’s tragic tale. By focusing on the rhetorical devices in the narrative, this research aims to elaborate on their manipulative function in diminishing the emotional impact of Bartleby’s eccentric attitude, ultimately leading to his tragic demise in prison. Despite the narrator’s apparent internal conflict between conscience and prudence, a close examination of specific instances where he disrupts the standard syntax, constructs a modest image of himself with litotes, and fosters disdain for the scrivener through epithets, reveals the narrator’s underlying anxiety about how the reader perceives his image. Through defamiliarization, Melville crafts a narrative where the familiar-such as the narrator’s supposed sincerity-is rendered strange, prompting readers to question the motives and reliability of the storyteller in portraying the tragedy of Bartleby.