I think that the events that precede the writing of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are just as important to understanding the story as the events that happen in the story itself. Melville, when he wrote the story, was coming off two failures, Moby-Dick and Pierre, which he believed would solidify his place in the literary canon; “Bartleby” is his way of dealing with this chaotic period in his life. In the short story, Melville is brutally honest with himself and his work: he addresses his critics' concerns through the narrator, while using Bartleby to admit his own mistakes in failing to get the recognition he thought he deserved. When Moby-Dick was published in late 1851 it was met with mixed reviews. “A reviewer in London's Britannia declared it 'a truly extraordinary work'; and a reviewer in the New York Tribune stated that it was "the best production yet to issue from that fermenting brain, and... gives us a higher opinion of the author's originality and power..." (" Herman Melville" 2305-2306). Many critics, however, were "dissatisfied with the novel's length, philosophical abstractness, and genre mixing, and the novel quickly faded from the literary scene without arousing in Melville the critical admiration he had expected" (2306). A particularly damning review came from the prestigious London literary magazine Athenaeum: “The style of his story is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, feebly, and obscurely handled” (Parker 18). The most interesting thing about Moby-Dick is that it seems to be exactly the kind of book Melville always wanted to write, knowing full well that no success would come. It. In a letter to Hawthorne he wrote: "'What I am most moved to write... middle of paper... the narrator to reason with Bartleby occurs in the scene before the new landlord calls the police to have him escorted into prison. "'Bartleby,' I said—'will you come home with me now—not to my office, but to my house—and stay there until we can make some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure? Come, let us begin now , at once.'” Bartleby replies, “‘No: I would rather not make any changes at present’” (Melville 2385). Bartleby is not willing to meet the narrator halfway enough or not; the question is whether Bartleby did enough or not. As for Melville: the question is not whether the critics did enough or not, it was whether Melville had done enough; to help them try to understand. In “Bartleby” – through Bartleby – Melville admits that he didn't do it.