754 Melville, Herman
developed in the subsequent relationship between
him and the lawyer. It is a development in which
the demands of the marketplace triumph over all
other human concerns. Bartleby, however, eventually
refuses to do any work at all, repeating the phrase, “I
would prefer not to,” making him economically use-
less and causing his employer to give him notice. But
Bartleby refuses to leave, and the scrivener becomes a
permanent, non-paying lodger in the lawyer’s office.
However, business considerations, in the form of
negative opinions expressed by business associates,
intercede. Fearing for his professional reputation,
the lawyer moves to new offices, leaving Bartleby
behind. This action leads inexorably to Bartleby’s
removal to the Tombs, followed by his death.
The connection between Bartleby’s refusal to
copy and a similar reluctance on the part of the
other scriveners is particularly significant. In order
to make the social point, Melville attempts to extend
Bartleby’s story from the individual to the more
general. The difficulty faced by the other lawyer who
moves into the narrator’s vacated law offices and
then by the building landlord helps widen the social
frame. So does the narrator’s allusion to the murder
case of Colt and Adams, to which he compares his
troubles with Bartleby. Melville here makes the
socioeconomic nature of his story explicit through
the narrator’s opinion that the murder could have
occurred only in a business setting, never in a private
residence or public street: “It was the circumstance
of being alone in a solitary office . . . entirely unhal-
lowed by humanizing domestic association” that
“greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation
of the hapless Colt.”
Commerce, then, leads to death. The lawyer
consistently refers to Bartleby using death images.
Describing their first encounter, the lawyer charac-
terizes Bartleby as “pallidly neat”; thereafter the law-
yer applies the terms “ghost,” “cadaverous,” “morbid
moodiness,” and others. Bartleby’s desk faces a wall
and the view, according to the lawyer, is deficient
in what landscape painters call “life.” And later he
speaks of Bartleby’s habitual staring out of the win-
dow as his “dead-wall revery.” Long after Bartleby is
dead and the lawyer has discovered that he worked
in the Dead Letter Office he returns to the money
and death images, “a bank note sent in swiftest char-
ity—he who it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers
any more. . . . On errands of life, these letters speed
to death.” Such sentiments reveal that the lawyer
is still reducing life to materialist terms. Bartleby’s
life and death express the widespread existence of a
mechanistic, life-deadening, freedom-denying set of
values emphasized in America by increasing indus-
trialization and commerce.
Susan Amperidentity in “Bartleby, the scrivener ”
An essay on identity in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
would seem to point to a discussion of the title char-
acter; however, the unnamed lawyer, who also serves
as the tale’s narrator, writes that “Bartleby was one
of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable”;
Ultimately, the story proves to be not about Bartleby
at all, so much as it is about the lawyer. He wants the
reader to identify him as a good Christian, employer,
and friend, yet he comes off in the end as a self-
serving Everyman. Instead of discussing Bartleby,
the lawyer promptly turns to discussing “myself, my
employees, my business, my chambers, and general
surroundings.” Before Bartleby appears, the reader is
introduced to the lawyer’s other employees, Turkey,
Nippers, and Ginger Nut. That the relationship
between these clerks and their employer establishes
a baseline against which to interpret the lawyer’s
subsequent behavior toward Bartleby is indisput-
able. A careful reading of the story reveals that
the lawyer’s acceptance of his clerks’ imperfections
is less a matter of God-like beneficence than of
complacency.
For their part, the clerks do not seem at all con-
tent to “bear the yoke.” Turkey’s lunchtime drinking
and his afternoon excesses, which include splitting
his pens and throwing them on the floor suggest a
powerful impulse to escape from his duties. With
Nippers this impulse is made explicit, as the law-
yer himself concludes that the clerk’s real object in
constantly readjusting his writing table is “to be rid
of a scrivener’s table altogether.” The two scriveners’
reluctance to write obviously prefigures Bartleby’s
refusal.
The introductory section of the story, then,
quickly establishes a reality that lies beneath and
largely contradicts the narrator’s pleasant represen-