In fact, the narrator seems to go to greater lengths than most people would in his efforts to help Bartleby. How responsible is the narrator for Bartleby's salvation? Our narrator fails the scrivener, who clearly needs help, but Melville in no way demonizes his narrator. At the end of the story, Bartleby's significance expands, and he becomes not only a double for the narrator but also a kind of double for all of humanity.
The descriptions of him frequently cast him as either a ghost or a corpse. With Bartleby, Melville is constantly evoking him as a kind of phantom double. Nippers and Turkey are like two faces of a coin, as are, finally, Bartleby and the narrator. Through doubles, Melville suggests our connection to other human beings. Doublingĭoubles make for an important thematic device. Bartleby cannot pretend to have enthusiasm for this bleak world, and so he disengages from it, in stages, until he dies. In the final prison scene Melville's description of environment extends the scope of the story from the business world to the general human condition. The character of the world of work and business is most often evoked through physical description of the landscape. Melville often describes the world through concise and telling descriptions of the environment. The modern economy includes constant and unfeeling change, which comes at a cost. We learn later that Bartleby may have lost a job due to similar bureaucratic change. He has lost the post he occupied during the central events of the story, as the position was deemed redundant and eliminated.
Though the narrator is a successful man, he is a victim, in some ways, of progress. Yet most adapt to it, with varying degrees of success. The work environment is sterile and cheerless. The description of the office is incredibly bleak, and the landscape of Wall Street is completely unnatural. " Bartleby the Scrivener" is one of the first great stories of corporate discontent. Buy Study Guide The world of work and business
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