"Bartleby the Scrivener"

There are a number of similarities between Bartleby and Melville: Bartleby is a "scrivener," that is a writer, like Melville. Like Melville, Bartleby refuses to copy the work of others to suit popular demand. Like Bartleby, Melville is "withdrawing" from a world that doesn't care about him anymore. Such similarities make it tempting to see the story as a psychological study of Melville himself.

But the story goes far beyond such a narrow interpretation. Critics have interpreted the story in many ways (indeed, it has been noted that Melville's work is so complex and ambiguous that whatever one wants to see in it, one can see), but there are a few obvious themes. The narrator is unnamed. He calls himself a "safe" man, tolerant and methodical. He is neither good nor bad, but a creature of convention and habit. Bartleby's passive resistance and lack of concern for himself puzzle him: he cannot conceive of a life in which one's own needs are unconnected to commercial gain. But he is sympathetic, and his compassion and understanding for Bartleby leave him feeling conflicted. Readers tend to be fascinated by Bartleby, but the narrator is the character who grows and changes during the course of the story.

The story was written at the height of U.S. exploration and expansion; the continent and its resources seemed endless, and the American Dream was being articulated: the idea that opportunities were so numerous that anyone could start with nothing and end up rich and successful. But as the country became more industrial and commercial, many were shut out of these new possibilities. The setting of "Bartleby," Wall Street, representative of immeasurable wealth, is presented as a prison, with images of death, as is the law office itself. There, people are reduced to merely human extensions of their pens. The documents they copy must be exact; there is no room for individuality or creativity. The men work in cubicles, alienated from each other. This law office is no place for American Dreamers: it is a dead end job (literally, for Bartleby), not a steppingstone to a higher position.

Bartleby isn't aggressively rebellious: he doesn't say "No"; he says "I prefer not to," and the narrator is stymied by that response. In trying to reason with Bartleby, he is forced to examine the grounds of his requests, and finds himself unable to justify them. He begins to lose his faith in the way he's always done things. He realizes that his only reason for doing things was not because they were right or had intrinsic value, but because that's how they'd always been done.

The narrator, because of Bartleby, is forced to see--to really see human suffering for the first time, and his whole being is shaken. He is a good man trying to become a better man, but he doesn't know how to proceed. He is brought face to face with the conflict between moral goodness and worldly necessity:

Melville's treatment of the lawyer's confusion over how to respond to this mutilated soul is a finely wrought portrait of a morally vexed man. But it is also a meditation on a large moral issue under dispute in antebellum America: how to define collective responsibility at a time when the old ad hoc welfare system of churches and charities could no longer cope with the growing numbers of workers and families being left destitute by the boom-and-bust cycle of the industrial economy. As casualties mounted, the scope of corporate responsibility was being narrowed in the courts by business-friendly judges who routinely ruled against plaintiffs in cases of workplace injury and property loss. (One suit, brought against the Boston and Worcester Railroad in 1842 by an employee who had been injured in a derailment caused by another employee's negligence, had been dismissed in a precedent-setting case by none other than Judge Lemuel Shaw.) In the 1850s, the United States was fast becoming a laissez-faire society with no articulated system for protecting individuals against impersonal power. In this respect, Bartleby--homeless, friendless, the urban equivalent of "a bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic"--was a figure more representative than eccentric" (Delbanco 220).