The Lawyer gives Bartleby all the money the scrivener is owed, plus the 20-dollar bonus. He tells Bartleby that he wishes him well, and that if he can be of service to the scrivener, Bartleby shouldn’t hesitate to contact The Lawyer.
Days later, the narrator contemplates Bartleby's general behavior. He discerns that he never dines out and lives on a scanty diet of ginger cakes. Filled with compassion, the narrator concludes that firing Bartleby would expose him to rough treatment for his involuntary eccentricities, and so he congratulates himself for opting to be charitable.
The Lawyer trusts Bartleby fully despite not knowing anything about him, and he cannot figure out that the fact that Bartleby arrives early to and leaves late from the office is caused by his condition of living there.
After questioning what Bartleby means by this phrase, The Lawyer gets up, walks over to Bartleby, and again tells his employee to come and compare the sheet with him for errors, thrusting the sheet over the screen towards his employee. But Bartleby doesn’t take it, and instead repeats that he “would prefer not to.”
Bartleby is, according to the Lawyer, "one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and, in his case, those were very small."
The ending of Bartleby the Scrivener is very vague. At the end Battleby starves to death in prison, meaning that he not only fasted, but he also sacrificed himself. This is a reference to certain religious martyrs who sacrificed themselves in order to peacefully preserve their faith.
The lawyer tries to bribe a jailer to assure that Bartleby is treated well, but upon his return weeks later, he discovers that Bartleby has been refusing to eat and has died of malnutrition. At the story's end, when the lawyer sighs “Ah Bartleby!
The Lawyer believes he is doing a good, Christian thing by allowing Bartleby to continue existing in his office. However, Bartleby's presence soon begins to draw the notice of some of the Lawyer's clientele, and he decides that Bartleby is bad for business.
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 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.
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).
Character Analysis Of Bartleby He is now an older man with a job for a family. The lawyer attempts to ease Bartleby back into reality because it assures him that he has not wasted his own life. From this moment on the lawyers conflict with Bartleby will only grow the rising tension between the lawyer and his own past.
As in most good literature, the main point of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is open to interpretation. One way to view the story is that there are people who suffer in ways that others do not understand, and this suffering may lead them to behave in ways that others do not accept.
Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' is a short story that takes place in a Wall Street law office. The story's first-person narrator is the lawyer who runs the law office.
He is unable to move out of his private world and make public aspects of himself. He copies documents, but refuses to compare them for that would mean working with someone, and his aim is to remain autonomous and self-contained. This neurotic behaviour is underlined by Bartleby's anorexic characteristics.
The Lawyer He is level-headed, industrious, and has a good mind for business. He is good at dealing with people, at least until he meets Bartleby.
Even before his usefulness wanes, The Lawyer is already skeptical of Bartleby because he doesn’t take joy in his work. However, because the office is so personally disconnected, he chooses not to discuss this with Bartleby at all. Additionally, The Lawyer stating that an important part of a scrivener’s job is to correct copies is in itself an example of the imperfection of language: even those whose job it is to write exact copies all day often make mistakes.
The Lawyer learns some of Bartleby’s qualifications —the most he learns about Bartleby in the entire story —and he fails to share it with the reader (another example of language being unreliable). The layout of the office is a clear example of the disconnected modern workplace: the boss sits in a separate room from his employees, and even when he places Bartleby near him, The Lawyer puts a screen around the scrivener so that he cannot see his employee.
At first, Bartleby provides The Lawyer with an enormous quantity of writing, working nonstop all day and not pausing for lunch. The Lawyer notes that he would have been quite delighted by this, if not for the fact that Bartleby writes “silently, palely, mechanically” rather than with any delight. The Lawyer then mentions that an important part of a scrivener’s job is to re-read what they have written in order to check for mistakes. Traditionally, when there is more than one scrivener present, they help each other with their corrections, and, because it’s tedious, The Lawyer believes this is not work that someone like “the mettlesome poet, Byron,” would be willing to do.
The Lawyer trusts Bartleby fully despite not knowing anything about him, and he cannot figure out that the fact that Bartleby arrives early to and leaves late from the office is caused by his condition of living there. This epitomizes how disconnected the office is, as well as how sharing language has failed to create a close-knit bond in the office. Additionally, Bartleby’s passive resistance becomes even more controlling of the office, changing The Lawyer’s habits and leaving Bartleby’s unchanged.
Although Bartleby spends literally all of his time in the office, The Lawyer is unable to get to know him better, and the only member of the office Bartleby interacts with is Ginger Nut, a twelve-year-old boy. Though The Lawyer could potentially learn about Bartleby from his young employee, he never ventures to ask Ginger Nut about his elusive scrivener. The Lawyer’s strange thought-process about Bartleby’s diet is derived from the Theory of Humorism, and its nonsensical conclusion is another example of language (and logic) failing to illuminate the truth.
In the past, The Lawyer says that he has helped with correcting copy himself, and one of the reasons he placed Bartleby so close by was so that he could easily call him over to go through this correcting process. However, on the third day (The Lawyer thinks) of Bartleby’s employment, The Lawyer hastily calls Bartleby over to correct a paper he is holding. He holds the copy out for Bartleby to take, but Bartleby never comes to his desk, instead calling out from behind the screen, “I would prefer not to.”
Next, The Lawyer details his employee Nippers, who is also a scrivener. Nippers is about twenty-five years old, has yellow complexion, wears a mustache, and, in The Lawyer’s view, is “victim of two evil powers—ambition and indigestion.”.
Bartleby’s comment is perplexing for two reasons. First, Bartleby defends his refusal to work without any explanation and yet assumes the lawyer would understand. Second, Bartleby asks whether the lawyer does not see the reason, which is particularly strange because “his eyes looked dull and glazed.”.
The Lawyer: The lawyer is the narrator of this story. He is about sixty years old, holds the office of Master of Chancery, and is well known in the Wall Street community. His attitude towards life is simple: he believes the easiest way of life is the best one, seeing work as a central component of this life. He finds controversy scandalous and therefore uses bribes, withdrawal, and logical arguments to make controversy go away. His insistence that he is an honorable man throughout the text make him less trustworthy as a narrator. He maintains a detached relationship with his employees relatively successfully until he meets Bartleby. His emotional entanglement with this scrivener breaks his professional detachment, revealing his own disillusionment with the isolation of the American workforce.
in. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Bartleby: The lawyer hires Bartleby to be a scrivener, a scribe who copies court and legal documents, for his law firm. While initially a prolific worker, Bartleby slowly begins to resist direct instruction, repeating the phrase “I prefer not to” when asked to do something.
The narrator’s love for Astor indicates that he is of the upper class. Caitlin, Owl Eyes Staff.
See in text (Bartleby, the Scrivener) John Jacob Astor’s presence in this story draws attention to the class conflict prevalent in this time. The Astor Place Riot of 1949 was the most deadly and violent class conflict in a series of disturbances in New York City from 1840–1850.
Adam is the Biblical character who was thrown out of Eden for eating an apple from the tree of knowledge. Here, the lawyer figures his conscience as his pious self versus a more self-serving self akin to Adam. He uses this quote to guide himself back towards the “righteous” response to Bartleby.
If the absence of Bartleby’s biography is an “irreparable loss” then the ensuing tale about Bartleby must be an essential part of literature. In this way the lawyer compels the reader to continue reading and suggests that his short story is already great literature.
He finds Bartleby's savings knotted in a bandanna and thrust into a recess of his desk and concludes that Bartleby has been living in the office at night. Thinking over Bartleby's general behavior, the lawyer concludes that the man does not converse, read, drink beer, or dine out.
Still, the lawyer delays taking action. The next day, Bartleby reveals that his vision is impaired.
Ginger Nut, the least mature of the foursome, suspects Bartleby of lunacy. Bartleby, saying nothing in his defense, withdraws to his corner. Days later, the narrator contemplates Bartleby's general behavior. He discerns that he never dines out and lives on a scanty diet of ginger cakes.
When confronted by such irrational behavior, the narrator rejects violence and vituperation. Instead, he resorts to the parlance and behavior of his profession, debating the situation as though it were a court matter, or else withdrawing from the scene or into the complexities of work as a means of quelling an inner compulsion to strike out at his mulish copyist. The contretemps that exists between the two men is the equivalent of a modern-day professional person trying to coax work from a recalcitrant machine, for the narrator considers Bartleby a "valuable acquisition," similar in modern times to a photocopier, computer printer, or fax machine.
He is compulsive about his copying, "gorging" himself on documents. On the third day, however, he surprises his employer by casually stating three separate times that he would "prefer not to" assist in proofreading a small document. Ordinarily, the narrator would have considered firing Bartleby, but because of Bartleby's composure and rational manner and because the narrator is preoccupied with business, he moves on to more pressing matters.
The lawyer knows that Bartleby is alone in the world, but nonetheless, he gives him six days to leave his employ. Surrounded by functionary stereotypes, the lawyer, a round character, considers himself a "safe" man. As such, he is conservative, rational, and ostensibly a charitable, approachable, but WASPish citizen.
In the coming days, Bartleby remains honest and industrious, except for singular pauses to stand in rever y and intermittent occasions when he prefers not to work. One Sunday morning, as the narrator walks toward Trinity Church, he stops at his office and discovers that Bartleby is locked inside.