ABSTRACT
Herman Melville published “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in 1853, a hundred years before the premiere of the quintessential absurdist play, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. And yet, in a number of ways, Melville’s inscrutable story anticipates the Theatre of the Absurd, and his enigmatic scrivener is a forerunner for the moribund characters that populate Beckett’s plays. This chapter highlights a number of theatrical conceits embedded in the story, as if Melville were staging his own proto-absurdist drama. Bartleby, like his Beckettian descendants, is defiantly inscrutable. Nevertheless, no matter how much these characters resist definition and decline to cough up their meaning, critics of Melville and Beckett (myself including) persist in projecting meaning onto them, speaking on behalf of absurdist works that refuse (or politely prefer not) to speak for themselves.
