Knowing Bartleby will never leave, the Layer decides to simply move his offices to another building. A few days after moving, the new tenant, another lawyer, confronts the Lawyer and asks him to take care of Bartleby. The Lawyer says he has nothing to do with Bartleby, so the other lawyer says he'll take care of him.
Full Answer
The Lawyer goes to speak to him and discovers Bartleby is dead. The Lawyer ends his narration of the story with the one clue he was ever able to discover about Bartleby: the late scrivener once worked at the Dead Letter office, and was fired after the administration changed hands.
The Narrator attempts to test Bartleby's resolve by asking him to do some other little tasks, like going to the Post Office, or simply going to the next room to fetch Nippers. Bartleby declines.
Bartleby ends up getting thrown into “The Tombs”, for refusing to leave the premises (the old office building). The Narrator goes out of his way to visit him and make sure he gets food while there, even though Bartleby continues his apathetic behavior, until he commits suicide by starving himself to death.
When the narrator discovers that Bartleby is living in the office, he had been on his way to church. But he changes his mind and decides not to attend.
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.
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.
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).
After his first attempt to fire Bartleby fails, how does the narrator finally rid himself of his employee? He moves his law office to another building.
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 begins by noting that he is an "elderly man," and that his profession has brought him "into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men the law-copyists, or scriveners." While the Lawyer knows many interesting stories of such scriveners, he bypasses them ...
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.
The narrator and the text do not explicitly explain the reason for Bartleby’s behavior, leaving it open to interpretation.
Bartleby shows classic symptoms of depression, especially his lack of motivation. He is a passive person, and good at the work he agrees to do. He refuses to divulge any personal information to the narrator. Bartleby's death is consistent with depression—having no motivation to survive, he …
The narrator is an unnamed elderly lawyer who works with legal documents and has an office on Wall Street. He already employs two scriveners, Turkey and Nippers, to copy legal documents by hand, but an increase in business leads him to advertise for a third. He hires the forlorn-looking Bartleby in the hope that his calmness will soothe the other two, each of whom displays an irascible temperament during an opposite half of the day. An office boy nicknamed Ginger Nut c…
Melville's major source of inspiration for the story was an advertisement for a new book, The Lawyer's Story, printed in the Tribune and the Times on February 18, 1853. The book, published anonymously later that year, was written by popular novelist James A. Maitland. This advertisement included the complete first chapter, which started: "In the summer of 1843, having an extraordinary quantity of deeds to copy, I engaged, temporarily, an extra copying clerk, who in…
Bartleby is a writer who withers and dies after refusing to copy other writers. More specifically, he has been described as a copyist “who obstinately refuses to go on doing the sort of writing demanded of him." During the spring of 1851, Melville felt similarly about his work on Moby-Dick. Thus, Bartleby may represent Melville's frustration with his own situation as a writer, and the story is "about a writer who forsakes conventional modes because of an irresistible preoccupation wit…
The story was first published anonymously as "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" in two installments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, in November and December 1853. It was included in Melville's The Piazza Tales, published in by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June.
Though no great success at the time of publication, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is now among the most noted of American short stories. It has been considered a precursor of absurdist literature, touching on several of Franz Kafka's themes in such works as "A Hunger Artist" and The Trial. There is nothing to indicate that the Bohemian writer was at all acquainted with the work of Melville, who remained largely forgotten until some time after Kafka's death.
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on its list of the 100 most influential novels.