Starting with the narrator's claim that he was going to relate a story about Bartleby, "the strangest [scrivener] I ever saw or heard of," Melville begins a juxtaposition where everything but Bartleby is discussed in some detail. The resulting circumvention causes Bartleby to be discussed more as a causal force than as a human. While the narrator admits he has limited information about Bartleby, he makes little effort throughout the course of the story to discover anything about him. He appears oblivious to Bartleby's slow deterioration from that of a mournful soul to a mechanistic being whose relevance has ended. Rather, he spends the majority of the time dwelling on how Bartleby's severely limited but profound intercourse with the

inhabitants of the office greatly affects the narrator's own life.

It is through the narrator's inaction that Melville poses the question of how much responsibility a human should have for his fellow man in such a dehumanizing and mechanistic era. It is clear through the tone of the story that the author believes the narrator had a larger duty to aid Bartleby than he exhibited. The tragic nature of the story's end, where the narrator comes back to visit Bartleby a mere 20 minutes after he has passed on, brings closure to Melville's point that our individual responsibility to our fellow man cannot be taken lightly or just occasionally on a whim when it might seem convenient.

To the narrator, Bartleby is much less a real man than an object of curiosity. He is so taken with Bartleby's limited

Some common words found in the essay are:
Non-Being Starting, Melville_Bartleby Scrivener, aid bartleby, story bartleby, bartleby discussed,
Approximate Word count = 538
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)