Working for the Lawyer, the Scriveners tasks would be to copy “rich men’s bonds and mortgages, and title-deeds.” (Melville 1) In order to understand how much the corporate office setting affected the Scriveners, one must take into consideration the type of office they were in the first place. However, I would argue that we shouldn’t overlook the other characters in employment, Turkey and Nippers, who both express their habits, albeit in a less inhuman form, compared to Bartleby’s that are a result of their occupations in a business office setting. Bartleby will become the main character that the audience focuses on, due to his behaviors being non-combatable to the norm for Scrivener employees. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically” (Melville 6). For example, The Lawyer describes his suspicions of Bartleby’s abnormalities even though he is a hardworking employee who performs his tasks with great consistencies: “I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. However, one should recognized where and how these effects take place within the employees themselves. One may expect to solely focus on the modes of production that caused this system of alienation, which is enforced by the business office setting with no mind for the employees who inhabit them. The imposition of this environment limits the individualism within the employees of The Lawyer, as a result this leaves them feeling alienated among their peers and the rest of society. In this story, the effects of mundane business work settings and occupations are channeled to the tilted character Bartleby, and is told through his employers’ point of view known as The Lawyer. In the 1850s, one of the first critical examples towards extreme capitalistic work settings emerged as a short story titled Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-Street by Herman Melville, a writer now regarded as one of the most important authors of American Literature.

Bartleby bartleby the scrivener