Bartleby the Scrivener
...cal meditation on the human condition, or as a religious parable on religion itself, but some may interpret its ultimate meaning, the story provides an exploration into such universal issues of the human experience as alienation, passivity, oddness, and psychological imprisonment. The critical approach that I’m using is the biographical approach. Obviously the narrator is some what of the author and his experiences with life. According to James Pickering of Fiction 100, Bartleby was a story about a man, who confronts life with an Everlasting Nay - "I would prefer not to," is his quiet defense against onrushing materialism of the day (960) . At the beginning the elderly narrator promises to relate what he knows about a peculiar man, one Bartleby, a scrivener who worked for him some time ago. Before he gets into Bartleby's story, he introduces himself and the other employees of his office. Of him, he says that he is a man always convinced that the easiest path is best. Though as a lawyer, he never goes before juries or judges. He runs a business dealing with rich men's bonds, mortgages, and title deeds. The office of the story is on Wall Street. There are two copyists and an office boy who works for the narrator at the time before Bartleby's arrival. The first copyist is Turkey. Turkey is productive in the mornings, but he's drunk by noon. From that point on, he is less than productive, but the narrator's attempts to send him home early have never met with success, and when he’s drunk, he's brash and over-enthusiastic. Nippers' is the second copyist, who is the victim of two evil powers ambition and indigestion. Though not a drinker, young Nippers' natural temperament is so irritable that it hardly matters, but because his irritation is caused by indigestion, his irritability starts as the day goes on. Turkey is productive while Nippers is foul-tempered, and Nippers is productive while Turkey is drunk. Ginger Nut, the office boy, is a lad of twelve whose nickname comes from the ginger nut cakes he fetches for the men. The narrator's initial self-characterization is important to the story. He is a man, who takes few risks and tries above all to conform. The most pragmatic concerns of financial security and ease of life are his priorities. He has made himself perfectly at home in the modern economy. He works as a lawyer dealing with rich men's legal documents. He is therefore an opposite or complement to Bartleby in many ways. He is also ill suited to be entrusted with the salvation of another. Bartleby is a phantom double of our narrator, and the parallels between them are noticeable. Nippers and Turkey are doubles of each other. Nippers is useless in the morning and productive in the afternoon, while Turkey is drunk in the afternoon and productive in the morning. Nippers cherishes ambitions of being more ...