Walt Whitman and Herman Melville "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" are set in New York City during the early years of the industrial revolution, but are markedly different in tone, theme and the perceptions and feelings of the main characters. Melville's characters exist without joy, love or hope, and merely drag themselves through a life of drudgery and alienation, without making any human connections to each other or to nature. Mankind in Bartleby's world is simply trapped in a pointless existence that ends with death, and unlike Whitman's narrator they are unable to rise above this grim, mundane world or imagine a common link with others or with the past and the future. Rather than simply being tools and machines carrying out routine, white-collar tasks, Whitman's narrator finds the resources within himself to transform an ordinary scene of returning home from work into a sublime spiritual experience, in which he perceives a bond with all of mankind, past, present and future, as well as with nature and the entire universe in a way that Bartleby and his coworkers never could have imagined.

Mankind as Melville describes it in "Bartleby the Scrivener" is in a highly dismal and alienated state in urban, industrial America. Indeed, this was one of the first such stories to describe...

His work is tedious, although like a robot or an office machine he performs his functions well enough until one day he simply decides that "I would prefer not to." His boss is a "safe" man, calm and forbearing, who spends his days handling the stocks, bonds and mortgages of wealthy capitalists, at least until his own position is finally made redundant as well. All the other members of the staff are equally alienated and underpaid, and lack even the names of human beings. Turkey is an elderly English alcoholic who is always drunk in the afternoons, and the lawyer hints that he should be retired because of his age. Nippers on the other hand is a young, ambitious clerk who does various shady deals on the side and hopes for upward mobility into a professional position, as does Ginger Nut, the office errand boy.
Bartleby is an exhausted, defeated and burned out man, who probably worked in the dead letter section of the post office in Washington before finding this position on Wall Street. Gradually, he just seems to fade away into nothingness, giving up on his work, then his living quarters and finally ending up in prison on a charge of vagrancy, where he starves himself to death. As the lawyer reflects on the immense sadness of the human condition,…