This paper analyzes Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" through the lens of the narrator as a symbol of neoclassical Wall Street rationalism. The essay argues that the narrator — a lawyer who prides himself on reason, patience, and fairness — is ultimately incapable of managing an employee like Bartleby precisely because of his blind faith in logic and convention. Through close reading of key exchanges and supporting characters such as Turkey and Nipper, the paper contends that Melville uses the narrator's helplessness to critique capitalism and the rigidity of professional culture in nineteenth-century America.
The protagonist in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is the narrator, a Wall Street lawyer. Bartleby — a man of strong and singular will — functions as the antagonist. The narrator shows a disturbing lack of good judgment by coddling Bartleby and repeatedly begging him to cooperate. In doing so, the narrator represents the failure of human understanding characteristic of the business world in Melville's era.
The thesis of this paper is that the narrator plays the role of the archetypal Wall Street professional — seemingly fair and reasonable, yet totally out of touch with how to manage employees or respond to difference and indifference. This dynamic appears to reflect Melville's editorial view of capitalism and Wall Street during nineteenth-century America. In short, Melville is not investigating Bartleby so much as he is exploring the intellect and rationality of the neoclassical, commercial man. It is the narrator — not Bartleby — who is truly under examination.
From the very beginning of the story, readers understand that the narrator — a person of reason and logic — is going to have difficulty with Bartleby, a man who displays quirky, recalcitrant behavior. The reader is positioned to sympathize with the narrator, who makes reasonable demands of Bartleby, only to receive responses like "I would prefer not to." After two straight days on the job in which Bartleby produced a tremendous amount of work, he rejects his next assignment on the third day without explanation.
What kind of man is the narrator? Above all, he is fair and patient. He is genuinely flabbergasted by what he perceives as Bartleby's "perverseness" and "unreasonableness," yet he remains curious about why this man he hired is so strange and uncooperative. Nothing in the narrator's life has prepared him for this kind of indifference. In trying to understand why Bartleby behaves in such a bizarre fashion, the narrator cannot conceive of what "reasonable objection" Bartleby could possibly have. His patience is almost remarkable, and his moral stance is admirable — but the reader can sense that the narrator's kindness is grounded in professional training rather than genuine empathy.
The narrator attempts to uncover Bartleby's personal history — as attorneys are trained to do — searching for any clue that might explain such stubborn, unbending noncooperation. But ultimately he falls back on logic and patience once more:
"Bartleby, never mind, then, about revealing your history; but let me entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the usages of this office. Say now you will help to examine papers to-morrow or the next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable — say so, Bartleby."
The response is not encouraging: "At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," Bartleby replies. The narrator appears pathetically hopeless in his efforts to motivate his employee. He possesses an undying, unswerving faith in the power of reason — and it is precisely that blind faith that renders him so ineffective. Using reason to understand the unreasonable produces a clash and a conflict that drives the story forward. Melville has constructed this conundrum with purpose: it is the narrator's inability to think outside the boundaries of rational convention, not Bartleby's eccentricity alone, that creates the impasse.
"Turkey and Nipper contrast Bartleby's passivity"
In conclusion, readers have to take the narrator's word that things happen the way he says they happen, because the only information provided comes from the lawyer/narrator himself. We see events entirely through his eyes, and those eyes reveal a man incapable of dealing with loose ends or making the adjustments that the situation demands. The narrator is a man of the tangible: "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with the profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best," he explains (3–4). He goes on to admit that nothing "of that sort" — meaning the conflict with Bartleby — "have I ever suffered to invade my peace." In other words, the lawyer has learned to operate in one way and one way only, and any circumstance that pulls him from that single path is troubling and alien to him.
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