SOURCE: "'Bartleby,' Melville's Circumscribed Scrivener," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. X, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 59-79.

Fisher is an American educator whose books include Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850's (1977). In the following essay, Fisher provides an overview of several critical approaches to "Bartleby," and insists that Melville intended Bartleby to be representative of humankind generally.

"Bartleby" is certainly the most familiar of Melville's short stories, reprinted in dozens of anthologies and analyzed by scores of critics. It would be hard to say something new about this early study of alienation, frustration, and catatonic withdrawal, and the surest guard against originality, I suspect, would be to take account of every commentary on the story. It would be more foolish, however, to try to clear one's mind completely of what others have written about Melville's pitiable and peculiar clerk and the initially complacent...