Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, writes the lawyer in herman melville's bartleby, the scrivener 1853 , it is fit i make some mention of myself, my employés. Intriguingly, the lawyer does not say he met bartleby instead, bartleby appeared to him. We might read the word appeared as the diction of a man who has practiced law for many years, a profession in which the presence of individuals is often referred to as an appearance. Yet in legal phraseology the verb to appear is typically followed by the preposition before. Bartleby, however, does not appear before the lawyer but, in a crucial change of prepositions, to him. Bartleby's appearance, of course, creates a subtle, dramatic tension, setting up the eventual climax in which he is shown to be quite different from the person he first appears to be. Yet the word appeared suggests a stranger possibility: perhaps bartleby quite literally appeared, as would an apparition.

But what would it mean to take melville at his word and read bartleby as an apparition? we would be reminded of what current critics of the story seem to have forgotten: bartleby is strange. One wrote of bartleby's ghost like taciturnity another called the story a weird tale, reminiscent of the eeriness of poe. Nearly all current work on bartleby follows from another critical genealogy not the occult but the quotidian, with one early reviewer going so far as to call the story a portrait from life. Marxist criticism of bartleby, in particular, takes its cue from this sense of the tale as a story of the everyday, casting it as a realistic story, with an emphasis on working life. Barnett's seminal essay bartleby as alienated worker 1974 , in which, as the title suggests, bartleby is the perfect exemplum of marx's alienated worker and melville's story a parable of the heartlessness of capitalism.

This early marxist criticism of bartleby has come under fire from several critics. Pointing to the fact that the lawyer continues to pay bartleby's salary and to help him even after he has stopped working, dan mccall suggests that readings of bartleby as a parable of the dangers of capitalism hinge on a fundamental misreading of the text, and of the lawyer in particular, who cannot easily be put into the mold of a typical heartless capitalist. In recent years, marxist criticism of bartleby has moved from this more thematic approach, which presents the story as illustrative of marxist concepts, to rigorously historicist readings.

While marx is present methodologically in this later criticism, marxism's relationship to melville's critique of capitalism tends not, for historical reasons, to be an overt subject of discussion, since there is no real evidence that melville was familiar with marx's writings at the time he composed bartleby. Instead, these critical interventions root bartleby in labor debates going on in new york city at the time of the story's composition and publication. The subtitle itself seems to suggest such a reading, offering this strange, inexplicable scrivener as a story of wall street.

As david kuebrich has shown, melville was well aware that wall street was a hotbed of labor activism and. First section pp 3 14 the elderly narrator promises to relate what he knows about a peculiar man, one bartleby. Before he gets into bartleby 39 s story, he introduces himself and the other employees of his office. Of himself, he says that he is a man always convinced that the easiest path is best. Though a lawyer, he never goes before juries or judges: he runs a business dealing with rich men 39 s bonds, mortgages, and title deeds. A short time before the central story begins, the narrator had been appointed master in chancery, a position that has since been eliminated.

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In an aside, the narrator says that he considers the elimination of the post a premature act, particularly since he 39 d counted on the lifelong security guaranteed by the job. Two copyists and an office boy work for the narrator at the time before bartleby 39 s arrival. From that point on, he is less than productive, but the narrator 39 s attempts to send him home early have never met with success. The second copyist, is the victim of two evil powers ambition and indigestion 9.

Though not a drinker, young nippers 39 natural temperament is so irritable that it hardly matters. But because his irritation is caused by indigestion, his irritability wanes as the day goes on. Thus turkey is productive while nippers is foul tempered, and nippers is productive while turkey is drunk. The office boy, is a lad of twelve whose nickname comes from the ginger nut cakes he fetches for the men.

He is a pale and miserable looking man: i can see that figure now pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn 11. The narrator hopes bartleby 39 s quietness will calm the hot tempers of the other two copyists. The office is divided into two rooms, one occupied by nippers, turkey, and ginger nut, and the other occupied by the narrator.

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Behind the narrator 39 s desk is a bust of cicero, the great roman writer and orator. The narrator installs bartleby in his own room, putting him at a desk by a window that looks out onto a wall. Bartleby 39 s workstation is separated from the narrator 39 s by a folding screen. Part of a scrivener 39 s job is the tedious work of double checking a copy 39 s faithfulness to the original.