The narrator has tried to explain Bartleby before. Early on, he reasons through charity: keeping the scrivener costs nothing, and it purchases a “delicious self-approval”—a “sweet morsel for my conscience.” He names his own motive and moves past it. Later, having read Edwards on the Will and Priestly on Necessity, he persuades himself that Bartleby has been “predestinated from eternity,” billeted upon him by Providence. “I penetrate to the predestinated purpose of my life,” he announces. This, too, dissolves—professional acquaintances gossip about the strange figure in his office, and the frame of mind collapses.
Each explanation is adopted in full and then abandoned. The narrator enters it, inhabits it, then passes through. Each one fails not because it is wrong but because it does not hold.
After Bartleby’s death in the Tombs—huddled at the base of a wall, knees drawn up, eyes open—the story could end. The narrator has closed the dead man’s eyes. He has quoted Job: “With kings and counselors.” There is nothing more to tell.
But Melville adds a postscript. The narrator addresses the reader directly and admits that if the story has raised questions about who Bartleby was, he shares them fully—and “am wholly unable to gratify” them. Then this:
Yet here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener’s decease. Upon what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I cannot now tell.
Three disclaimers in two sentences. It is a rumor. Its basis is unknown. Its truth is uncertain. The narrator has told us, as clearly as prose can manage, that what follows is unverified.
The report: Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, removed by a change in the administration.
And then, immediately, without transition:
When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?
This is where the story’s final passage begins. The narrator takes the rumor he has just disclaimed and builds on it the most emotionally intense prose in the entire story. The pale clerk takes a ring from a folded paper—the finger it was meant for moulders in the grave. A bank-note sent in charity—the one it would relieve nor eats nor hungers any more. Pardon for those who died despairing. Hope for those who died unhoping.
On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Then the closing: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”
The story’s most famous line rests on what the narrator has told us, three sentences earlier, he cannot verify.
The earlier explanations—charity, predestination—were each believed and then dropped. The Dead Letter Office is not dropped. It is disclaimed and embraced in the same breath. The narrator does not say the rumor is true; he says he cannot tell if it is true. Then he writes as though it is. The gap is not between believing and disbelieving. It is between the narrator telling you the explanation is unverifiable and the narrator building the story’s climax on it as though it were solid ground.
The text does not resolve this. There is no moment where the narrator acknowledges the contradiction. He does not say: I know this is unproven, but it moves me anyway. He simply moves from disclaimer to emotion in continuous prose, as though the two belong together, as though the uncertainty is not an obstacle to feeling but its condition.
“Ah Bartleby!” The exclamation marks a man the narrator could never explain. “Ah humanity!” The second exclamation extends that failure to everyone. The story ends not by explaining Bartleby but by building its final music on the confession that it cannot.