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“My chambers were up stairs at No. – Wall-street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life’. But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade…”
This passage is located at the very start of the short story when the Lawyer gives the reader a description of his Wall Street office. The lawyer mentions two different walls that make up his office view—the wall of the sky-light shaft and the brick wall that he can see outside his window. The presence of the walls makes the office sound claustrophobic and constricting and the lack of color (the walls are white and black respectively) gives the office a sterile feel. The overbearing and impersonal tone in this passage sets the mood for the rest of the story.
“The cushioned seat of a rickety old sofa in one corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form. Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese.”
The Lawyer decides to stop by his office on a whim one Sunday morning and is surprised to find Bartleby there. After Bartleby finally leaves, the Lawyer methodically examines his office and determines that Bartleby must be living in the office based on the gathered evidence. The above quote encapsulates his observations. As is often the case with Melville, his diction is crucial. Words such as “rickety,” “old,” “empty,” “ragged,” and “morsel” emphasize Bartleby’s pitiful state and inspire sympathy from both the reader and the Lawyer.
“Being under no disgraceful charge, and quite serene and harmless in all his ways, they had permitted him freely to wander about the prison, and especially in the inclosed grass-platted yard thereof. And so I found him there, standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves.”
Here, the Lawyer describes the story’s only other setting besides the Lawyer’s office—the prison that Bartleby is sent to after he refuses to leave the Wall Street building. The emphasis on walls, which Melville began at the start of the text, returns one final time as the Lawyer notes the towering architecture that encloses around the prisoners to keep them from escaping. Just like at the start of the text, the walls generate an ominous tone that will persist until Bartleby’s ultimate demise within the prison grounds.
