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Which one is it:

- antisocial personality disorder

- avoidant personality disorder

- post traumatic stress disorder

- borderline personality disorder

- major depression

- paranoid personality disorder

- acute stress disorder

- schizophrenia

I am not a therapist, but by a process of elimination, my guess would be major depression. There is nothing to suggest that Bartleby is out of touch with reality.  He is not hearing voices, for example, or seeing anything that is not there.  He does not really act to avoid all human connection, just certain activities. Could working in a dead letter office create PTSD?  I don't think so, although I must say that if one placed May from The Secret Life of Bees in such an office, she might have experienced this disorder.  Borderline personality disorder usually involves more dramatic forms of manipulation. Bartleby is utterly passive, in a way that is often manifested in major depression, a kind of tyranny of weakness. 

The key, I believe, is his overidentification with his previous employment in the "dead letter" office. It seems to me that he considers himself to be a kind of dead letter that has arrived at its destination, first the narrator's office, and ultimately, the Tombs. What better place for a dead letter than a  "tomb"?

The other option that occurs to me is that Bartleby is suffers from an autism spectrum disorder.  He functions far better with things than with people, and his sole "line" suggests that someone taught him one way to express his preferences, or lack thereof, with human beings, and he does not have the wherewithal to articulate other ideas. 

I will be interested to know what other people think.   

speamerfam,

Bartleby the scriver is probably just as ambiguous when it first came out. Melville does not seem to provide enough information to understand the scrivener. From the first scene in the story, the lawyer apparently confesses his inability to understand Bartleby, when he says Bartleby is "one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable," and for whom "no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography".

This would lead the reader to believe that the lawyer is either witholding information or too professional as a lawyer in his description of Bartleby for readers to accurately gage the character. The lawyer, it seems, is an unreliable narrator.

Bartleby discovers the place to be "a solitary office, upstairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanising domestic associations" in a building "deficient in what the landscape painters call life."'

Bartleby seems to be a product of his environment, therefore I wouldn't say that has any disorder other than to appreciate his last place of employment. he might "function better with things than with people," but who doesn't working in an intolerable situation.