Bartleby the Scrivener: Dead End Letters & Wall Street

Eyad Mustafa

At the end of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the narrator (the Lawyer) reveals the one clue he has to Bartleby’s history: a rumor that Bartleby once worked in the dead-letter office. The Lawyer believes this is the cause of Bartleby’s strange behavior: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?” The Lawyer’s theory is that reading all those dead letters, intended for people who are dead or gone, must have been so depressing that it drove Bartleby slowly to his apathy and emotional detachment. Working at a law firm at Wall Street can be very, very boring. There is no view of the beauty of the outside world, no nature; just blank walls and cubicles. It is the opposite of what you need to live. The letters could also make a good metaphor for the drudgery of the emerging middle-class, blue-collar job. Sorting letters day in and day out could eventually be difficult for anyone to endure for a long time, and such repetitive tasks are, even today, a common source of depression for some employees. By making them dead letters, Melville makes the depressing nature of such a task more explicit. When he changes jobs, Bartleby is willing to write letters or copies for some time, but when he is asked to read them, he would “prefer not to.” For a short time, he finds some satisfaction in the creation, rather than the destruction, of letters, but finally he is unable to do even that.

Bartleby counts for no more than a commodity in the lawyer’s office. But he prefers not to be one, which makes him the “forlornest” of mankind. The lawyer describes him as a “lean, penniless wight”, one who spends all his days copying for “four cents a folio”. He cannot escape from the work place; in fact, the lawyer eventually discovers that he lives at the office, among the emptiness of Wall Street. As the lawyer says, “what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is emptiness”. Bartleby lives among the walls of Wall Street which has led to his strange and lonely behavior.