Chapter 5 - Ah Bartleby, Ah Humanities!

Summary

This is Bartleby’s Wall Street employer speaking. The “Dead Letter Office at Washington,” so described, is “rumoured” to have been a previous workplace of the copyist, Bartleby. The employer (and narrator), who is never named in Melville’s story, seeks a reason for Bartleby’s unexplained abscondence from official duties – his passive refusal to complete the tasks he was hired to do, namely: to proofread, collate, and hand copy mortgage contracts – as well as his refusal to vacate the office in lower Manhattan where he “secretly squats at night” (Edelman, 2013, 100); his refusal to dine after being arrested and housed at the prison known as “the Tombs”; and his passing some days later.