““Indexed here by the specific feelings of paranoia and guilt, rather than an affective absence or illegibility, Harry’s political passivity, and correlative obsessions with maintaining his privacy and solitude, will become most evident in his inability to prevent a murder engineered by the private corporation for which (in a trajectory that neatly reverses Bartleby’s move from the postal service’s Dead Letter Office to a lawyer’s firm on Wall Street) he has left the Attorney General’s office to work—an inability he cannot overcome despite the technical expertise that has given him advance knowledge of the plot and thus his chance to redeem his past detachment. The allegorically charged moment of narrative stasis that concerns us occurs in the hotel room in which this murder (a sign as well as a direct consequence of Harry’s political impotence) has taken place.””
![“[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as…” quote by Umberto Eco](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/544/umberto-eco-313_characters_w-hen-i-put-jorge-in-the-library-i-did-n_2581277.jpg)
