Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, The Scrivener'

Title

Herman Melville’s tale, Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street, explains the story of a lawyer’s assistant who continuously ignores the tasks that his employer requests him to do. Bartleby, thanks to this tale, is what people use to refer to coworkers or employees that refuse to do their jobs. The infers that Bartleby is not simply A scrivener; the narrator refers to a couple different scriveners that work for him, Turkey and Nippers, but Bartleby is the scrivener specified within Melville’s text because he is the main issue and reason for lessons the narrator learns within the story line. Scrivener is considered a scribe, clerk, or notary; in Melville’s tale, from what is able to be understood, is described as a scribe for the narrator’s office. In the text he refuses to do anything not related directly to his job as a scribe. Bartleby “prefers not to” (Melville 7) review his copies aloud with his coworkers and boss, run to the post office or do any other errand, and many other tasks the narrator gives him throughout the line of the story. A Story of Wall-street infers that it is not the only tale produced at Wall-street and story tells the reader that the text is mostly fictional.

Setting

This alone allows a reader to understand the pressures of big businesses such as major law firms. The reader knows that Melville is referring to a law firm because of the narrator’s use of “law-copyists” (Melville 1) when discussing his employees at the very beginning of the tale. The reader also sees a setting of a dull building with “glass folding-doors divided [the] premises into two parts” (Melville 6) side by side with other buildings so close that “a window which originally afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks” (Melville 6) with very little light allowed into the main room of the