Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Published 1853 · 256 pages · 14,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Stories
How hard is Bartleby, the Scrivener to read?
Bartleby, the Scrivener scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- 19th-century legal and commercial vocabulary with Melville's characteristically elevated literary register.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Formal 19th-century sentences with the lawyer's circumlocutory style creating deliberate syntactic indirection.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Bartleby's refusal resists concrete interpretation, pushing the reader toward abstract philosophical questions about will and meaning.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- A short story with minimal plot but maximum interpretive density; every detail has been scrutinized by critics.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- The lawyer-narrator cannot understand his own story, creating a gap between narration and meaning the reader must fill.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The walls, the screen, the dead letters, and Bartleby himself function as inexhaustible symbols.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Melville's irony targets the lawyer's self-congratulatory charity while maintaining genuine sympathy for both characters.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Bartleby dies but nothing is explained; the dead letter office epilogue adds pathos without resolution.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- First-person chronological narration in a single setting; the complexity is interpretive rather than structural.
How Bartleby, the Scrivener is regarded
Bartleby, the Scrivener holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.