Bartleby, the Scrivener: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

The narrator introduces himself as a safe, cautious lawyer who has spent his career managing wealthy clients' estates and bonds — work that involves no courtroom drama, only paperwork. His office on Wall Street sits between two buildings whose blank brick walls are all that the interior windows look out on. When he hires Bartleby, the man arrives with nothing — no references are given, no history volunteered — and installs himself at a desk in a corner screened off by a green folding screen. He writes furiously day and night, as though his entire being were concentrated in copying.

Rising action

The first refusal arrives without warning or emotion. Bartleby simply says he would prefer not to. The lawyer finds himself unable to respond with the authority he expects from himself. He lets it go. The refusals accumulate over weeks. Turkey and Nippers are outraged on the lawyer's behalf, but Bartleby is unmoved. He begins to refuse all copying. He refuses to explain himself. He refuses to leave when dismissed. The lawyer, increasingly unnerved, discovers that Bartleby has been sleeping in the office and eating nothing but ginger-nuts — and something in the man's pallor and stillness makes the lawyer feel he cannot simply throw him out.

Climax

The lawyer tries various accommodations: he raises Bartleby's pay, offers him different lodgings, eventually offers him a position in his own home. Bartleby prefers not to accept any of these. Feeling that Bartleby's presence is now threatening his reputation — clients are alarmed by the pale, unmoving figure — the lawyer moves his entire office to a new location. Bartleby does not move. The new tenants have him arrested and taken to the Tombs (New York's city prison) when he will not leave.

Ending

The lawyer visits Bartleby in the Tombs and tries to ensure he is fed. Bartleby refuses to eat. A grub-man offers to bring him food; Bartleby prefers not to dine. He is found dead, curled at the base of a wall. The lawyer later learns — through rumor — that Bartleby had previously worked in the Dead Letter Office, sorting undeliverable mail. The lawyer imagines the effect of such work on a sensitive man: all those messages that never reached their destination, all that human expression come to nothing. He ends with the famous lament: 'Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!' For another story of inexplicable withdrawal from the world, see The Metamorphosis.

The narrator (the lawyer)

Melville's narrator is defined by his own self-description: a man of prudence, a safe man, someone who never addresses a jury. He is not cruel or uncaring — he repeatedly tries to help Bartleby and is genuinely troubled by his inability to do so. But he is also a creature of convention and reputation, and the story gradually reveals that his charity has limits. His final statement — 'Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!' — is moving, but it is also the response of someone who ultimately did not know what to do. He is a decent man at the edge of his capacity for understanding.

Bartleby

Bartleby is one of American literature's most enigmatic figures. Melville gives him no backstory, no family, no emotional expression beyond the repeated phrase 'I would prefer not to.' His pallor, his stillness, his ghostly presence in the office all suggest a man already in the process of departing from the world. The Dead Letter Office detail at the end — unverified, offered as rumor — implies that Bartleby has been surrounded by failed communication his entire working life. Whether that explains him or not, he remains fundamentally unknowable. That unknowability is the story's point.

Turkey and Nippers

These two copyists provide comic relief and humanizing contrast. Turkey is productive in the morning and erratic after lunch (when he drinks). Nippers is irritable in the morning and steady in the afternoon. They are functional, opinionated, and fully human — the foils against which Bartleby's inhuman stillness registers. Their demands that the lawyer act more firmly against Bartleby represent normal workplace logic; Bartleby refuses to be subject to normal workplace logic.

The Wall Street setting

Wall Street in 1853 was the center of American commercial capitalism, and Melville clearly intends that context. The work of the office — copying documents that facilitate the movement of money — is mechanical, repetitive, and entirely divorced from creative expression. The walls the office windows face are blank and close. Bartleby's refusals take on systemic meaning in this context: he is refusing not just tasks but the entire logic of a society organized around the subordination of individual will to economic function.

Passive resistance and its limits

Bartleby's repeated 'I would prefer not to' is the most famous act of passive resistance in American fiction. He never argues, never accuses, never demands. He simply declines. This non-confrontational refusal makes him impossible to argue with — and, for the lawyer, impossible to handle. Melville seems to suggest that passive resistance, pushed to its extreme, becomes a form of self-erasure. Bartleby resists everything, including food and life itself. The resistance is complete, and so is the defeat.

Charity and its failures

The narrator's repeated attempts to help Bartleby — money, lodging, alternative employment — are genuine but inadequate. He never asks Bartleby what he wants or needs; he offers what he imagines would help. The story suggests that charity modeled on the giver's assumptions rather than the recipient's actual condition cannot reach its object. The lawyer cannot save Bartleby because he cannot understand him, and he cannot understand him because Bartleby will not speak.

The Dead Letter Office

The final revelation — that Bartleby may have worked in the Dead Letter Office, sorting mail that never reached its destination — functions as a symbolic explanation without quite being one. Dead letters are messages that failed to arrive: human connection that went nowhere. If Bartleby spent his working life surrounded by these failed communications, his subsequent retreat from all communication becomes darkly logical. The image resonates with Melville's own sense, after Moby-Dick's failure, of being a writer whose work did not reach its readers.