Speaking through the Mask: Melville’s “The Piazza” and “Bartleby”

Abstract

In this paper I examine “The Piazza” and “Bartleby,” focusing on Melville’s concern with writing as a quest for truth and reality; how his quest deepened at the period when he was writing his magazine tales and how his reflections on writing resulted in the ambivalent and ambiguous endings in the magazine tales. In rendering isolated and alienated people and social barriers in commercialized society, Melville is interested in revealing the shortcomings of the narrators telling of their confrontations with these characters. The reader is made to feel uncomfortable and perplexed during and after reading, for he shares the narrators’ values and assumptions. In the two tales, Melville addresses the problem of writing itself as it involves a limited perception of every-day life, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the issue of truth-telling. This hints at the artist’s doom in which he has to tell the truth only through the mask. The ending of “The Piazza” points to Melville’s effort to endure a creative tension, neither obsessed with nor despairing of the bitter truth of reality nor totally ignoring the blackness of truth coming in with darkness. The deep pathos felt in the ending of “Bartleby” shows the author’s own recognition, lurked in the tale, that his fiction may not reach its destination like dead letters. It seems that the deeper Melville seeks to dive into the dark matrix of truth, the more does he become conscious of the limits of fiction and language and, paradoxically, the more masks he wears in telling truth.