Bartleby - as Hermes, Trickster

Hermes is a god in Greek religion and mythology. Considered a god of transitions and boundaries, Hermes is the protector of psychotherapy, of the healing arts. For Jung, Hermes’ role as guide of souls to the underworld made him symbolically the guide for inner journeys, mediator between the conscious and unconscious. He is the god friendliest to man and in this benign capacity of good-fellowship sometimes manifests as Trickster.
Tricksters are archetypal characters who appear in the myths of many cultures. The trickster is an alchemist, a magician. He questions and mocks authority. Tricksters "...violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis."

It seems to me that Melville’s story lends itself to a psychotherapeutic, Jungian, interpretation. In this reading, Bartleby (B) is Hermes, as Trickster, who awakens the Narrator (N) to the corrosive compulsion to self-negation present in his unconscious and initiates a new personal attitude in him of self-awareness, holistic vigilance and the possibility of psychic wholeness. Hermes/Trickster teaches N a series of lessons by means of a rhetorical device: his essentially anarchic refrain, I prefer not to.
Cicero is mentioned twice. He was a lawyer and philosopher but also, according to Professor Google, a politician and rhetorician, and it’s Cicero in these capacities who B communes with and gains inspiration from. B is engaged in a sly exercise in the art of the possible as he employs indirect measures both to prompt and draw N into a process of self-discovery. Melville’s claustrophobic, blank walled, setting suggests a crucible in which an experiment is taking place.
N becomes increasingly fascinated by his own reactions to B, by the rush B brings him through provision of opportunities for more and more extreme self-indulgence in his rescuer urges, which he is mistaking for altruism in an onanistic parody of Christian selflessness. And to feel. I felt additional incentives tempting me to my fate. I burned to be rebelled against. N maintains that the easiest way of life is the best, he dreads confrontation of any kind. He longs to feel, for too long, in avoiding conflict, he has felt nothing but a conviction of personal worthlessness.
N lives life within patterns of expectations. B appears to have none. N assumes; B rejects through tactics of deflection. His behaviour is morally ambiguous. He trespasses, has no respect for the convenience of others or their property. He borrows/acquires a key to the office so he can live there rent free. He is a man of action, he confronts, he prefers, he generates a black hole of all consuming negative energy, exposure to which, logically within the law of equal and opposite reaction, provokes a positive outcome for N.
B is Trickster who invades N’s existence in order to guide him to self-knowledge, through an alchemical catharsis involving reduction to helplessness, surrender of self, so that holistic integration of his unconscious into conciousness, might be achieved. So reduced to dependency on B does N become that he even asks B to live with him, a request B refuses. This response is symbolic of Hermes’ care of man, of how the healthy psyche will not permit utter dissolution of the personality. This is an exquisite touch by Melville, pointing to the insatiable nature of N’s, and by corollary humanity’s, unconscious cravings, how these can never be fully satisfied and the danger of reduction to invalidism and loss of autonomy they place an individual in.
N loses his innocence in the course of the story; he ends up wiser about himself, about how little in control he is of his own impulses, ruefully aware of how he succumbed to temptation to step further and further into self-indulgent exercise of his only apparently humanitarian inclinations. N is now aware of the germ of self-dissolution heretofore lurking hidden in his personality, and better placed to resist its contagion. In order to thrive he must try to apply the truth he has learned - that his reactions to B’s perceived plight sprang primarily not from altruistic concern for a fellow human, but from humanity’s inability to resist the unconscious imperatives of the individual’s predestined inborn disposition.
But what, if any, might be the practical consequences of this integration of the unconscious, the deeper psychic content, be? Will N be less liable to be taken by surprise or take the path of least resistance in future?
Although he is unlikely ever to achieve the landlord's ‘energetic summary disposition to direct action’ which precipitates B’s bodily removal from the landlord’s premises, N can train himself to be more assertive from now on, build self-respect. While the codes governing his nature have been predestined, inborn from eternity, he still has free will to curb the morbid drive to self-immolation revealed to him by Hermes. N, in order to maintain psychic health, must strive to exercise self-discipline, abandon the path of least resistance
N throws out, in a teasing coda, the possibility that B’s apparent eccentricities might be explained by his dismissal - due to predestined circumstances beyond his control - from the Dead Letter Office. In raising this, N is acknowledging that he could have had no wiser guide than B, veteran of a graveyard job where the products of predetermined impulse and consequence come to rest. The ending is thus a positive one, the despair implied only apparent. N, grateful for the gift of enlightenment B has brought him, recognises B’s nobility of soul, now resting with kings and councillors, though only metaphorically, for B/Hermes is a god and therefore immortal.
With Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!, Melville affirms the ever renewing creative promise and potential of the present and the human will.