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Who Is Bartleby The Scrivener

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“Wall” Street “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a short story by Herman Melville,b describes the narrator’s experience employing an introverted and seemingly isolated scrivener in his office on Wall Street, the financial district of New York. However, the idea of “Wall” Street can be read more literally, seeing as the scrivener, Bartleby, seems to find himself constantly surrounded by walls. Bartleby is walled in, not only by physical walls, but by walls he puts up himself in order to preserve his isolation, and by the pressures of the capitalistic society he is forced to live in.
From the very beginning of the story, Bartleby is surrounded by physical walls in his new work place. The narrator describes the view from both sides of his building, one side being a “white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft” and the other side a “lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade” (256). Not only is the office building surrounded by walls, but Bartleby himself is put in a corner with a “high green folding screen” …show more content…

By the rules of the capitalistic society that he lives in, Bartleby is worthless once he stops working and it is his decision to quit working that lands him in the Tombs, where he eventually dies. The narrator informs the reader that Bartleby has sent to the Tombs with the charge of being a “vagrant” (276), a person without a home or regular work. Bartleby is forced to live in a world where not having work is a crime worthy of prison, even though he chooses not to work. When he finally decides to break out of the capitalistic walls that forced him to work, Bartleby is arrested and placed within the confines of yet another set of walls, those of the

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