Essay On Bartleby The Scrivener

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Zakaria Ahmed Eng 2150 Date: 3/10/2015 How Physical Space Can Represent a Person’s Life? In the story “Bartleby the Scrivener”, physical spaces are one of the most important themes of the story that represents Bartleby’s behavior and his surroundings. Bartleby started as a copyist and an alive man, but as the narrator goes on to narrate the story, he changes and later he is represented as a lifeless man. He stopped doing his job, he stopped eating, he stopped moving and mainly he was refusing to do everything a normal human being does. So to represent Bartleby and his lifeless character the author used walls that follows the same footstep that Bartleby followed. Another explanation of walls can be that, Walls separates different things, isolates objects or human from one another. Walls can also…show more content…
He is suffering from walls from inside, his mental barrier that keeps him isolated from others, uncomfortable with human contact. Bartleby has removed himself to such a degree that the only thing keeping him alive in Earth is his work, which he gives up later on and says “I prefer not to” to anything that he is asked to do. At the beginning of the story Bartleby was working good and communicating with everybody else in a good manner but with different walls blocking him from others. In another occasion to describe his office the author says “I placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall”.(17) After working there for couple of weeks, after looking at the walls everyday, Bartleby changed along the way and lost his taste for work because all he can see are dead
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