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Summary
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. Knowing Bartleby will never leave, the Lawyer decides to simply move his offices to another building with the thinly veiled excuse that his current office is too far from City Hall. He informs Bartleby of his plan so that the man can make a new arrangement, but Bartleby does not respond.
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 that he will take care of him as he sees fit. A few days after that, the Lawyer is again accosted by the neighboring lawyer and some police officers and they charge him with dealing with Bartleby, who now sits all day on the banister of the stairs and sleeps in the entryway to the office building, frightening the other tenants. The Lawyer agrees to speak to Bartleby.
When the Lawyer approaches Bartleby he is as passively stubborn as ever and does not give any substantial answers to any of the Lawyer’s questions. He tries to suggest various alternative employment options for Bartleby but he is resistant to every option. Finally, the Lawyer even offers to allow Bartleby to live in his own home, but still Bartleby refuses and does not move from the banister. The Lawyer, helpless and stupefied, simply leaves. Bartleby is subsequently arrested as a vagrant and thrown in jail. The Lawyer visits Bartleby as soon as he learns that his old employee has been arrested but Bartleby refuses to speak to him. Still anxious to help, the Lawyer arranges for Bartleby to be fed good food while in jail, but Bartleby refuses to eat. Finally, the narrator visits Bartleby one day, who has fallen asleep under a tree in the prison yard. The Lawyer goes to speak to him and discovers that Bartleby is dead.
The Lawyer ends his narration of the story with the one clue that 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 Lawyer wonders whether it was this job, sad and depressing as it is, that drove Bartleby to his strange madness.
Analysis
Melville had a unique gift for description and contemplation in his writing, and his short stories (and many of his novels) unfold very slowly and thoughtfully. This was not a style unique to Melville; his good friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, had a similar writing style. Melville's narrator, the Lawyer, slowly unfolds the events of the story, taking his time to provide small details that better set the scene or highlight a character. For instance, early in the story the Lawyer tells the reader that he once gave his scrivener Turkey a coat, and that Turkey became very protective of it, and even a little egotistical about having it.
But even more significant than this level of detail is Melville's pacing. Like films and music, stories can be paced, and Melville is a very methodical writer. His stories are generally paced very slowly, though they often have one or two scenes of intense action (for instance, the escape of Don Benito in "Benito Cereno," or the last few chapters of Moby Dick). Usually, these intense scenes serve as a climax or a revelation to all that has occurred before it. In "Bartleby," this action occurs in the rapid imprisonment, decline and death of Bartleby, all in the space of about three pages (the exact climax is probably when the Lawyer, after confronting Bartleby on the banister, is refused for the last time, and leaves Bartleby to be taken to prison). Though Bartleby's imprisonment and death seem like an inevitable conclusion to this sad tale, the speed with which it all occurs makes it seem like an afterthought, as if it isn't that important. By making his climax and falling action so swift, Melville forces the reader to be more considerate of everything leading up to it.
One important theme in "Bartleby" is that of charity. Many readers have puzzled over the character of the Lawyer. We must ask, in the end, does he do well by Bartleby, or does he contribute to the man's ruin? Most readers would admit that the Lawyer is surprisingly accepting of Bartleby's stubborn attitude. At first, this is due to the fact that the Lawyer simply doesn't know how to deal with Bartleby. He is so surprised that Bartleby refuses him (especially in such a calm manner), that he doesn't reprimand him. At one point, Bartleby's calm attitude—as if it were perfectly reasonable that he prefer not to do what the Lawyer asks of him—drives the Lawyer to wonder whether he's the one that's crazy: "It is not seldom the case that, when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins…to vaguely surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.”
The Lawyer does his utmost to figure Bartleby out, but he does abandon Bartleby at the end, moving his office to escape the morose man. Many readers, puzzled by the mystery of Bartleby, often pass over this greatly humorous event: the Lawyer actually moves his office rather than having Bartleby taken away. Most of Melville's humor is very subtle, or lost in the shuffle of other themes and meanings). But when Bartleby is threatened with imprisonment, the Lawyer actually offers to allow Bartleby to stay in his own home, which Bartleby refuses. Most readers might interpret this as the ultimate act of charity; but has the Lawyer really done everything he could for Bartleby? The Lawyer may actually have made a crucial, self-centered error: he momentarily thinks that perhaps the reason that Bartleby haunts the office is in some way connected with the Lawyer himself, not the office. But Bartleby is not really connected to either of these things. His tendency is to become increasingly more withdrawn and less mobile, for whatever reason—that is what keeps Bartleby around the offices.
No analysis of Bartleby is complete without mentioning the last paragraphs, where the Lawyer reveals the one clue he has discovered about Bartleby: a rumor that the man once worked in the Dead Letter office before being fired in an administrative shake-up. The narrator wonders whether it was this lonely, depressing job, reading letters intended for people now dead or gone, that drove Bartleby into the depressive spiral that ended in his final stillness beneath a prison-yard tree.
