The narrator can't do anything to get rid of him, so he just lets him sit around and gets Nippers and Turkey to pick up his slack.
Bartleby dies. In a final act of protest, Bartleby refuses to eat, and subsequently starves to death in prison. By just preferring not to live any longer, Bartleby announces his individuality in an ultimately fatal, dramatic fashion: if he cannot live as he "prefers" to, he apparently doesn't want to live at all.
The lawyer doesn't fire Bartleby after he declines to work, instead he gives Bartleby another chance. The lawyer preference to remain calm shows that he chooses to stray from confrontation. Bartleby continuous refusal to work leads to him being fired, but he refuses to leave.
With the sudden changes of Bartleby, the Lawyer feels overpowered, and it is like he does not have any power over his employees like Bartleby. Marcus explains that Bartleby is a psychological double for the Lawyer. The author says that Bartlebys power over the Lawyer quickly grows as the story progresses (Marcus 1).
The lawyer acts quite contrary to what one would expect, especially from a lawyer. He appears to be calm and almost non-irritable by Bartleby's responses.
The story concludes with Bartleby in prison. He prefers not to do anything there, either, and even prefers not to eat. The Narrator goes to visit Bartleby, but unsurprisingly, he can't get through to the strange scrivener. Eventually, Bartleby wastes away and starves to death, leaving only the Narrator to mourn him.
Why does he never leave the office? Does he have any family? Rather than listening to his other employees and firing Bartleby, he basically fires himself by moving offices. The Narrator does this because he cannot bare to be mean to Bartleby, because he just does not have it in him to do anything negative towards him.
Summary and Analysis Resolution. Returning to work, the lawyer finds a note from the landlord explaining that he has had Bartleby arrested for vagrancy and that the lawyer should appear at the prison to state the facts in the case.
Does Bartleby have any lasting impact on the lawyer? If you think he does, explain the nature of the change in his character. Yes, because the lawyer changed who he was. Through Bartleby, he learned compassion and was a dynamic character.
Some critics think that, therefore, the Lawyer represents Melville's readers, asking Melville to write the same old fiction he had been writing all along, and Bartleby is Melville himself, replying that he would "prefer not to" and eventually withdrawing into himself and his misery.
The Lawyer: The narrator of the story is a gray-haired Wall Street lawyer. He is the protagonist of the story because the plot is driven by his problem and goal. He has two major conflicts which drive the story. The first is his outer conflict with Bartleby.