Bartleby, the Scrivener

“My chambers were up stairs at No.—Wall-street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life.’ But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my windows panes.”

The vivid imagery of this passage paints a picture of the lawyer’s office and foreshadows the significance of the brick wall, which later gains importance as Bartleby’s focus for his daydreams. The “lurking beauties” that can be seen unaided also foreshadow Bartleby’s damaged vision.

“I always deemed [Nippers] the victim of two evil powers—ambition and indigestion. The ambition was evinced by a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal documents.”

Melville uses humor both to reveal the narrator’s opinions on ambition and to describe Nippers to the readers. The narrator’s harsh view of Nippers’ ambition is expressed by Melville’s word choice of “unwarrantable usurpation.”

“In fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent. He was a man whom prosperity harmed.”

Through a simile comparing Turkey to a horse (note that “Turkey” is already an animal name), the narrator expresses a worldview in which people are restricted from birth to their socioeconomic status. Some people are built for poverty, some for wealth, much as there is the right amount of oats to feed to a horse.

“In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.”

The narrator introduces us to Bartleby through descriptions not of his appearance but the general aura about him. Note the specific language Melville chooses: “pitiably” and “incurably.” This word choice foreshadows the narrator’s struggle with his pity for Bartleby and his conclusion that Bartleby is incurable. It also clarifies for the reader the narrator’s worldview that some things about people are unable to change.

“Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.”

Bartleby and the narrator are walled off from one another, and yet they share a space. Their physical relationship mirrors Bartleby’s personality. He is a fast and accurate worker but inflexible in what he will and will not do. He is both in the office and in a world of his own. He refuses to ever leave the office, yet he is never fully there.

“Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, ‘I would prefer not to.’”

Bartleby never specifically refuses to do anything. He only states a preference. The narrator’s shock at an employee stating his preference suggests that his workers usually fulfill his requests without opposition.

“Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, it will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.”

The narrator lays out the function of charity for one such as himself—it is a self-serving tool for easing his conscience. The narrator also admits that to humor Bartleby costs nothing and is “cheap,” which contrasts with his extreme measures to escape Bartleby.

“And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!”

The narrator’s understanding of the office as “snug” and cozy begins to shift as he sympathizes with Bartleby and comes to understand the homeless scrivener’s plight. The normally busy office becomes, at night, a space akin to a ruined and sacked city.

“Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered around me. The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet.”

“Presentiments” becomes a kind of synonym for “foreshadowing.” Melville makes direct reference to the literary device at play in this quote, as the narrator catches fanciful visions of Bartleby wrapped in a funerary sheet. Aside from the funerary sheet’s presence, these presentiments accurately portray Bartleby’s death scene.

“Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.”

As Wall Street is busy and full of life during the day, so it becomes a brooding ruin at night. Melville uses this contrast between light and dark (which obscures and hides) and uses it to personify happiness and misery. Bartleby’s presumed misery is hidden in the office at night, with nobody else around.

“Instantly it occurred to me, that his unexampled diligence in copying by his dim window for the first few weeks of his stay with me might have temporarily impaired his vision.”

Bartleby is inarguably the lawyer’s most industrious worker, preferring to ignore all distractions that take him away from his duty of copying documents. Bartleby’s reward for this hard work in the dismal and dim office space is damaged eyesight. The narrator does not notice Bartleby’s clouded eyes until his attention is drawn to them by Bartleby, suggesting a lack of attentiveness to the people around him on the part of the lawyer.

“It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt.”

The office becomes a space abandoned by divine powers and goodness, and one that can incite murder because of its complete lack of human touch. The dismal descriptions of the office have built to the extreme point that they can explain the murder of Samuel Adams by John C. Colt.

“And so I found him there, standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves.”

Even in prison, Bartleby finds another wall to stare at as he stands in a reverie. Melville has placed Bartleby in two situations where he has been effectively stuck, first in working where he lived and slept and ate and now in a literal prison. In both situations, he takes to staring at walls and daydreaming.