I think the events leading up to the writing of "Bartleby, The Scrivener" are just as important to understanding the story as the events that take place in the tale itself. Melville, when he wrote the novella, was coming off two failures, Moby-Dick and Pierre, which he thought would cement his place in the literary canon; “Bartleby” is his way of approaching this chaotic period of his life. In the story, Melville is brutally honest with himself and his work: addressing his critics' concerns through the narrator, while using Bartleby to admit his own faults in failing to achieve the recognition he thought he deserved . When Moby-Dick was published in late 1851, it met with mixed reviews. “A reviewer in the London Britannia declared it a “most extraordinary work”; and a reviewer in the New York Tribune proclaimed it "the best production ever to issue from this seething brain, and... it gives us a better opinion of the originality and power of the author..." ("Herman Melville » 2305-2306). ). Many critics, however, were "dissatisfied with the novel's length, its philosophical abstraction, and the mixture of genres, and the novel quickly disappeared from the literary scene without bringing Melville the critical admiration he expected" (2306). A particularly damning review came from the prestigious London literary magazine Athenaeum: “The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is handled hastily, weakly, and obscurely” (Parker 18). What's most interesting about Moby-Dick is that it seems to be exactly the kind of book Melville always wanted to write, knowing full well that no success would come from it. he. In a letter to Hawthorne he wrote: "What moves me most to write... middle of paper... the author's attempt to make Bartleby see reason occurs in the scene before the new owner calls the police to have him escorted to jail. “'Bartleby,' I said... 'will you come home now, not to my office, but to my dwelling, and stay there until we can come to an arrangement at our leisure which suits you ? Come on, let's start now, right away.' » Bartleby replies: "'No: at present I would prefer to make no change at all'" (Melville 2385). Bartleby is not willing to meet the narrator halfway. “Bartleby” is not about whether or not the narrator has done enough; it's a question of whether Bartleby has done enough or not. Regarding Melville: it's not a question of whether or not critics have done enough to understand his new way of writing; it was a question of whether or not Melville was doing enough to help them try to understand. In “Bartleby” – through Bartleby – Melville admits that he did not.