![]() ![]() The other barriers, the black and white walls visible from the office windows and the dead-wall of the prison yard, Bartleby deliberately seeks out in a perpetual confrontation with immovable, insurmountable objects, suggestive of the unchanging task expected of a copyist. In the office, the narrator erects a folding screen, appropriately tinted green, the color of money, to separate Bartleby, a mundane worker, from himself, a somewhat pompous, smug attorney. The setting, a kind of emotional ghetto, is, appropriately, a bustling commercial center where people stride to and from work and discuss the coming election. Its dense symbolic structure has been called a "parable of walls," an illustrative story of Wall Street's self-imposed restrictions on the human spirit. One of Melville's most puzzling short works, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which critics have labeled one of America's greatest short stories, resembles his other masterpieces - Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd - in that it defies a quick, tidy assessment. ![]()
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