Melville’s style of unreliable narration and manipulation of the reader stems from his experiences among the American working class and the subjugated natives of various cultures, most prominently the Typee people of the Marquesas.  Able to witness first-hand the atrocities committed by the “civilized,” white, Capitalist monstrosity of the time period against not only races deemed inferior but also members of the lower class, Melville became disillusioned with the idea that intelligent, enlightened Christians were more fit to inhabit the world and its society than so many others who were subject to their oppression.  In his writing from the 1850’s onward, he began to depict “the victims of capitalism and slavery… through the eyes of an obtuse observer representing the class of ‘gentlemen’ whose prosperity rested on the extorted labor of the workers they dehumanized…” (Karcher 2623).  By doing so, Melville began to make better and better use of “increasingly elaborate strategies for subverting his readers’ prejudices and conveying unwelcome truths” (Karcher 2622) and was able to “mercilessly [anatomize] the reader he had given up hope of converting” (Karcher 2623).  Two stories in which Melville does a particularly fine job of this are Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno.  Though he uses slightly differing techniques in each story, Melville is able in both of them to fool the reader into accepting not only the narrator’s perspective but also his ignorance and prejudices.

In Bartleby, the reader is introduced to “a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (Melville 3).  Through the first-person narration, the reader soon discovers that the man is an elderly mortgage lawyer who lives comfortably off of dealing with wealthy people’s legal paperwork.  He remarks that he “never addresses a jury” (Melville 3), and so probably has never even spent time (professionally, at least), in a courtroom.  Dealing only with the wealthy and working in a rather sedentary profession are the two main factors in the narrator’s ignorance, although they can at first easily be overlooked, if only because the narrator himself so readily admits to them.  He employs three people at the beginning of the story, two of whom are copyists and the third being a hideously underpaid office-boy who spends his time fetching snacks for the other men in the office.  The two main employees are Turkey and Nippers, and the narrator’s view of their respective situations is clouded by his ignorance of their problems both in and out of the workplace.