SOURCE: "Fantasy of Passivity: Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener," in The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, The Free Press, 1973, pp. 63-79.

In the following excerpt, Kaplan and Kloss insist that Bartleby exhibits symptoms of manic-depression, and contend that the narrator's veneer of passivity is a neurotic attempt to repress underlying impulses toward aggression and violence.

Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is a work of comic irony comparable to such novels as Ford's The Good Soldier or Durrell's Justine, both of which use the device of fallible narrator. In The Good Soldier, for instance, Dowell is an unperceptive, sentimental, sexually impotent man, married to an immoral sensualist. The focus of the novel is not the inevitable failure of the marriage, but the very efforts of this man—who has never felt toward his wife "the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct"—to comprehend...