“Bartleby, the scrivener: A story of Wall street” 755tations. These contradictions touch particularly on
the character and behavior of the narrator himself.
Specifically, the identity that the lawyer reveals in
this introductory section appears in several facets,
and each facet establishes a dimension or level of
meaning on which the rest of the story plays. Thus
the lawyer is revealed as a materialist, and the story
develops the clash between his materialism and the
spirituality represented by Bartleby. The lawyer is
shown for a hypocritical Christian, and this theme
is developed in the rest of the story. The lawyer is
also identified as a capitalist, and the story plays
with perfect consistency as an attack on the excess of
industrialization. And beneath all these levels is the
question of just what these different identities reveal
about the lawyer.
The narrator, after much soul-searching, sug-
gests that he and Bartleby share “the bond of a
common humanity.” Such feelings induce the lawyer
to accept Bartleby, when the latter refuses the order
to leave, as a permanent, non-paying lodger in the
lawyer’s office. This is the first time the lawyer has
acted from personal rather than business motives.
He considers this favor to Bartleby as his special
religious “mission in this world.”
The lawyer’s initial indulgence of Bartleby seems
motivated by kindness, and his subsequent actions,
such as his offer of money and his offer to take
Bartleby home with him, appear to go beyond self-
interest, although these are open to question. The
money may simply make it easier for the lawyer to
fire Bartleby; taking him home may seem the easi-
est way out of the embarrassing situation in which
the lawyer finds himself. He has already told the
reader of his “profound conviction that the easiest
way of life is the best.” We can hardly credit him
with Christian charity if he is acting only so as to
minimize his own discomfort. The lawyer’s position
toward Bartleby, however, is not without sympathy.
As readers we can see that Bartleby is impossible,
and we feel that Bartleby is odd, but we are con-
vinced that he is honest. And we know that when
Bartleby says “No,” he is telling us the truth.
The narrator, however, cannot face this truth. He
is one of those who says “Yes”: to the discipline of
the marketplace; to the good opinion of the well-to-
do; to the pieties and proprieties of a casual Chris-
tianity. For Melville, this means the lawyer lies, and
it is this deception about his true identity that is the
focus of the story. For it becomes clear that the nar-
rator rather than Bartleby is the real representative
of humanity. It is not his failure to live up to Christ’s
teaching that makes him so human, but his evasion
of the truth about himself and the nature of life. In
creating this lying narrator, Melville has found a true
Everyman.
Susan AmperreliGion in “Bartleby, the scrivener”
A Christian reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is
invited by the overwhelming number of religious
allusions in the story, which include the lawyer’s
repeated explicit references to Christian principles
as the guide for his behavior toward Bartleby. These
begin as more humanistic than strictly religious,
with the lawyer’s recognition that “both I and
Bartleby were sons of Adam.” They become more
expressly Christian with his recollection of the
divine injunction: “A new commandment give I unto
you that ye love one another.” Subsequently the view
becomes downright Calvinistic with the lawyer’s
suggestion that his situation has been “predestinated
from eternity. And [that] Bartleby was billeted upon
[him] for some mysterious purpose of an all wise
Providence.”
Another reference linking the lawyer with orga-
nized religion is the lawyer’s “indulgence.” The refer-
ence lies in the sale of indulgences by the Catholic
Church, a practice that precipitated the Reforma-
tion. The connection between these two concepts
becomes more explicit in a passage in which the
lawyer in effect attempts to purchase his own indul-
gence of Bartleby as future investment for his soul:
“To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange
willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay
up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet
morsel for my conscience.”
The Christian themes in the story become
more interesting, and more complex, when readers
consider the imagery that identities the character
of Bartleby with Christ himself. Bartleby’s general
demeanor, including his “wonderful mildness,” is
reminiscent of Christ’s. His association with a
source of natural light coming into the office from