[In the following excerpt, Kaplan and Kloss insist that Bartleby exhibits symptoms of manic-depression, and contend that the narrator's veneer of passivity is a neurotic attempt to repress underlying impulses toward aggression and violence.]

Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is a work of comic irony comparable to such novels as Ford's The Good Soldier or Durrell's Justine, both of which use the device of fallible narrator. In The Good Soldier, for instance, Dowell is an unperceptive, sentimental, sexually impotent man, married to an immoral sensualist. The focus of the novel is not the inevitable failure of the marriage, but the very efforts of this man—who has never felt toward his wife "the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct"—to comprehend and describe that failure. So long as he cannot acknowledge the importance of sexuality in human relationships his narrative vision is corrupted, and that is the whole point of the story.…

Melville's narrator is no less enmeshed in an effort to explain events beyond his comprehension. And the manner in which the author enables us to understand both the causes and the extent of that limitation rivals the full artistry of Ford's achievement.

"I am," this narrator writes, "a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best." This belief, he tells us, has made him a certain kind of unambitious lawyer, one who can "in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds." And for thirty years he allows nothing to invade this peace—until he hires the scrivener Bartleby. The conflict which follows seems on the surface no more than an obscure antagonism in a Wall Street office, between the narrator and an employee who will not work. But in fact they collide with a force as intense as any which may bedevil two men. With precise accuracy, Bartleby undermines the tenuous code by which this lawyer has lived. The narrator's passivity, prudence, and life-long obsession with safety are all challenged with uncanny success. And as he continues to describe these events, he never suspects the nature of the role he himself has played.

The main character of the story (or so the narrator believes) is Bartleby, a pale, silent scrivener who comes in to his employ. At first Bartleby does an extraordinary amount of writing, but he refuses to do any other work, objecting each time with the incongruous remark that he "would prefer not to." Angry and astonished at this challenge to his authority, the narrator nevertheless allows Bartleby to remain, because of his ceaseless industry as copyist. But as the days follow, the complete oddity of the man becomes apparent. He lives at night in the office, associates with no one, never speaks except to answer (and not always then), never leaves the office, eats nothing but ginger nuts, and with increasing frequency stands unmoving, either in the center of the room or looking out the window at a "dead brick wall." At last the scrivener declares he will do no further work of any kind. When the narrator concludes that Bartleby is the victim of an incurable disorder and fires him at last, he finds that Bartleby would prefer not to be dismissed and would prefer not to leave the office.

Even under these conditions, the narrator allows Bartleby to remain, thinking that to do so is an act of charity and a service to God. But when his clients and colleagues all begin to talk about the strange, immobile apparition in his office, the narrator can tolerate Bartleby no longer. Unable to simply put him out, the lawyer himself moves, locating his office elsewhere. For a time Bartleby is still successful in refusing to change his life. Turned out of the office by the landlord and the new tenant, he haunts the building, "sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry by night." In order to avoid any publicity, the narrator now tries to persuade the scrivener to find a new job, and even to come home with him until a job can be found. But Bartleby refuses in his usual manner, and at last is taken to prison as a vagrant. There, emaciated by his refusal to eat, he stares at a dead-wall in the yard, and finally dies in a foetal position at its base.

The narrator ends his story with what he calls a "suggestive rumor," that Bartleby once worked in a dead-letter office. "Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness," he concludes, "can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?" But this is a maudlin view of Bartleby's character. The thought that there is a faulty communication among men may cause distress, but not madness. The world is full of grave-diggers, hangmen, and asylum attendants, who do not become Bartlebys. The narrator errs, and ascribes a factitious cause to Bartleby's derangement, because he fails to see the motivation behind such bizarre and self-destructive behavior. We can well understand why it is difficult enough to perceive the motivation implicit in neurotic behavior; and Bartleby's derangement, by almost any standards a psychosis, all the more completely masks the underlying motivation which directs him to his dead-wall reveries. The narrator has, in addition, his own reasons for misconstruing Bartleby's purposes. But if we take our cue from the psychoanalytic view, specifically of a manic-depressive psychosis, much in the text will support this understanding of the man.

Bartleby's disorder may be termed a psychosis because his surrender to symptoms is so complete that he breaks with reality. He makes no effort whatever to communicate with others, to end his depression, or break out of his immobile stupor—in short, no effort to comply with basic needs, including the need to eat. So complete is his submission that we have no reason to believe he is aware that anything is wrong. His comment, that he would prefer not to work, is like a later remark, when he is emaciated to the point of death, that he would prefer not to eat dinners. The language is rationally put, but the sense is bizarre and alien to rational goals. He speaks of "preferences," but no alternatives seem possible to him. Such behavior conforms with that of the manic-depressive. [In his "Manic-depressive Psychosis",] Silvano Arieti's description of the depressive stupor of this disorder seems almost to have been written as a portrait of Bartleby:

Depressive stupor is the most pronounced form of depression. Here there is more than retardation: the movements are definitely inhibited or suppressed. The patients are so absorbed in their own pervading feeling of depression that they cannot focus their attention on their surroundings. They do not seem to hear; they do not respond. They are mute, with the exception of some occasional utterances. Since they cannot focus on anything, they give the impression of being apathetic, whereas they are actually the prey of a deep, disturbing emotion. These patients cannot take care of themselves. Generally, they lie in bed mute, and have to be spoon-fed.

Unless they are successfully treated during the attack, physical health may suffer severely. They lose up to a hundred pounds in certain cases.…

This description accords well with Bartleby's immobility, apathy, and helplessness. But the only clue it offers to the inner motivation of the man is the comment that beneath the depression is disturbing emotion. But, we may ask, what is the nature of an emotion so uncompromising that it renders him incapable of both sanity and life? The basis for an answer is given in various ways by the story itself. Bartleby, after all, has an extraordinary effect on the small world in which he lives. If we dismiss his passivity as simply a crazed negation of life, we miss the fact that in his own bizarre fashion he achieves a great deal. If we look, in fact, with a disinterested eye at the towering strength with which he refuses to comply with the demands of his world, and at the shattering effect he has on the man who represents that world to him, we will find he achieves an absolute "adjustment" on his own terms. Like a fallen Satan, Bartleby gives up one world to reign in another. The choice may be an insane one, but it is not without its own motivation.

The keynote to Bartleby's psychology is given in a superb description of the underlying dynamics of depressive behavior, by Walter Bonime. Dr. Bonime writes out of a psychoanalytic practice with depressives and with a theoretical orientation well-defined and fruitful. He points out that the psychotic person exhibits crucial attributes also found in the neurotic—specifically, that both are engaged in purposive behavior and that those purposes are best understood in the context of their social action. [In his "The Psychodynamics of Neurotic Depression,"] he offers a description of the depressive individual that brings us directly to the motives of the scrivener:

… the depressive is an extremely manipulative individual who, by helplessness, sadness, seductiveness, and other means, maneuvers people toward the fulfillment of demands for various forms of emotionally comforting response. The emotional and behavioral corollary to this extreme manipulativeness is an almost allergic sensitivity to being influenced; this engenders forms of elusiveness manifested in helplessness, withdrawal, physical and mental retardation, manic behavior, stubbornness, irresponsibility, unproductive preoccupying activities, and various types of failure and self-destruction.

The manipulativeness of the depressive is the most significant fact of this description. Behind apparent apathy there is purposive action. The man who "would prefer" to do nothing, on the contrary, indulges in the power to frustrate. It is a grim battle in which the depressive spares himself least of all. Dr. Bonime vividly describes this tenacity in terms which again bring Bartleby directly to mind:

The depressive is determined to prevail, to win in every interpersonal encounter. For him life is a battle—with individuals and with fate. He is going to get what he wants, and he is not going to be forced to exert himself responsibly in pursuit of a more realistic goal.… He will sacrifice some or all of his potentials for living, but in his subjective, distorted, competitive emotional orientation he will nevertheless be victorious.

In the competitive world of the depressive, this rebellion is a living declaration that "Nobody's going to make me do anything, nobody can force me to respond." The depressive even carries this out by escape into psychosis or suicide, in which extreme instances the process may be a charade of "You can't make me live on your terms," or "at all."

This description of the uncompromising depressive is the criterion by which to judge Bartleby. To understand how successful he is in these terms, however, we must look again at the narrator. It is in the interaction between them that Bartleby's victory is enacted. And behind the self-deceptions of the narrator's story, the force of that victory is unmistakable.

Bartleby enacts his depression in the company of an antagonist exquisitely picked. There could hardly be imagined an interlocking of disorders greater than that which exists between the narrator and his scrivener. They are as intricately joined by nature and temperament as Othello to lago, or Mario to the magician Cipolla. The narrator has lived all his life out of the reach of conflict, evidently with amazing success. He is now confronted in Bartleby with a man who must not only be fired, but forcibly taken from his office—if not directly by him, then by the police at his command. This would seem to be a not very difficult task, even for a peaceable man. He has, after all, no other rational choice, and morality and the law are on his side. But the difficulty of the task should not be judged solely on the basis of external obstacles. One is reminded of Hamlet, the man with no compunctions about killing and with all the motivation and opportunity he needs to kill, who yet delays so long he must at last exclaim:

I do not know
Why yet I live to say "This thing's to do,"
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't.

As the story gradually makes clear, the difficulty for Melville's narrator, as much as for Hamlet, is within the mind.

The first confrontation takes place shortly after Bartleby is hired. The scrivener has already indicated manic-depressive behavior, in the unnatural intensity of his diligence: the narrator tells us that "he did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light." And we see something of the melancholia which underlies the mania, in the narrator's observation that Bartleby "wrote on silently, palely, mechanically." But when Bartleby is asked to proofread documents—a standard part of any clerk's duties—he replies, as he invariably will, that he would prefer not to. His employer sits for a time in "perfect silence, rallying [his] stunned faculties." Understandably, and almost the last time his response to Bartleby will be so rational, he decides that either Bartleby misheard him or he misheard the reply.

He repeats his request, but Bartleby, in his unvarying way, states that he "would prefer not to." "Are you moonstruck?" the narrator asks in high excitement, striding across the room. "Moon-struck" is a fair enough appraisal of the scrivener, but the narrator has merely put the question rhetorically. It will be a considerable time, a revealingly long time, before he considers again the question of Bartleby's sanity. On this occasion, when the scrivener voices again his refusal, the lawyer returns to his desk. Now he tells himself that he would have "violently dismissed" Bartleby from the premises, were it not for his peaceable manner. He writes that he would have "as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors," and concludes that he is too hurried by business to take any corrective action.

There is something odd in all of this. The refusal of an employee to do his job should be equally objectionable in any tone of voice. And when the narrator concludes that he is hurried by business, he has in fact already retreated from Bartleby across the room to his desk. Equating his clerk with a plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero is perhaps understandable, given the scrivener's pale, inexpressive face. But to justify inaction on the basis of this resemblance seems far-fetched, even bizarre. Most curious is his comment that he would have violently dismissed Bartleby if the scrivener had been an ordinary man. An ordinary man can be simply told to go. If he wishes to save face because of his own passivity, we would expect him to refer to an immediate, not violent, dismissal.

On the second occasion that the scrivener is asked, and refuses, to proofread, the narrator responds in much the same way. He writes that he is "momentarily turned into a pillar of salt," and that with "any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me." We note that he still imagines violence, which he refers to now as a "dreadful passion," as his only alternative to inaction. There is, in this repeated association to violence, the suggestion that he is passive with Bartleby because, for him, any action implies getting violent. We may recall that he has carefully shunned conflict all his life, made himself an eminently safe and prudent man and, as he puts it, suffered nothing ever to invade his peace. One wonders why such a design for living has been necessary. Perhaps, we can begin to infer, the overriding motive of his life has been a struggle to contain violence latent within him, violence needing only the smallest conflict to set it off.

If this is the case, if the "cool tranquility" of his "snug retreat" is a defense against his own murderous aggression, it becomes clear why he should so weakly suffer a clerk's challenge to his authority and why he works so hard to sustain his passivity with rationalizations. He must have the idea, however unconsciously, that were he to act in anger, he might kill the scrivener. There is a subtle measure of support for this view in his allusion to Lot's wife. He may choose the metaphor with the thought that he is himself as inert as a pillar of salt. But there is the suggestion, too, that he is paralyzed by the sight of destructive rage—not God's, but his own. He seems to sense the presence of this unconscious motivation with his comment that he is "strangely disarmed" in a "wonderful manner." "Strange" and "wonderful" often imply, as we have seen elsewhere, a sense of unconscious motivation. And the term "disarmed" itself suggests the prevention of violence.

The theme of passivity as a defense is underscored by what follows. He turns to his other employees for support, which they readily give. One of them thinks it perfectly right that Bartleby should be asked to proofread, another declares the scrivener should be "kicked" from the office, and a third thinks the scrivener is a "luny." Theirs is the realistic and normal response, reached without effort. We see how simply the problem can be solved when no unconscious inhibition intervenes. It is revealing enough that the narrator should need their guidance in the first place, and even more so that he now ignores it, concluding once again that he is too busy to face the problem.

And so, in the following scenes, we have the picture of a man who only partially suspects the extent of his ambivalence and who alternates between extremes of anger and abject surrender. Each time he surrenders, he offers himself new grounds to justify doing so. He decides that Bartleby "means no mischief and "intends no insolence"; that his "eccentricities are involuntary"; that with a less indulgent employer Bartleby might be "driven forth miserably to starve"; and that in consequence he can get along with Bartleby notwithstanding his behavior. Finally, and by this time not surprisingly, Bartleby is permanently excused from anything he would prefer not to do—which is to say, everything but the work of copying. As the narrator tells us:

His steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing revery behind his screen), his great stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, make him a valuable acquisition.

In short, he converts a depressed and recalcitrant clerk with tendencies to catatonic stupor into a fortunate gain for the office; a piece of legerdemain designed solely to persuade himself. His argument leaves conveniently out of account what a painful experience for him surrender has been. For instance, he writes that he "could not, for the very soul of me, avoid falling into sudden spasmodic passions with him. For it was difficult to bear in mind all the time those strange peculiarities, privileges, and unheard of exemptions …". And, although he cannot let himself get angry, his repressed anger forces him back again and again to new confrontation. We read that "the passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition—to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own." He is caught between an anger he can neither effectively repress nor translate into action, so that each time he must be humiliated by the very encounter he has brought about. As he writes on one such occasion:

I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy returned. Was there any other thing in which I could procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?—my hired clerk? What added thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?

That "added thing" is Bartleby's refusal, one Sunday morning, even to admit his employer into the office (Bartleby has been living there and is not yet ready to open the door). It is the ultimate degradation for the narrator, who "slinks away," in spite of "sundry twinges of impotent rebellion." He keeps repeating to himself, as he goes, that his inaction is the result of Bartleby's "wonderful mildness," but this explanation, as usual, begs the question. He never examines why this mildness should have such an effect on him. Even the language he uses beclouds the issue. For instance, he writes that he is "awed into a tame compliance" by the "austere reserve," of his clerk's "eccentricities." Were he to describe Bartleby's behavior more accurately as crazed and now criminal, his own situation would become intolerable. He would have to end his passivity, something he cannot do, or begin to question his own sanity, something he does not wish to do.

The insistence that it is Bartleby's mildness which is the narrator's undoing is not, however, without an element of truth. Walter Bonime's central point about the psychodynamics of depression is worth recalling in this connection: that it is a passive means to defy, manipulate, and defeat the world. The virtue of passivity is that it masks aggression under the guise of helpless suffering—a mask useful not only to prevent retaliation by the world, but to conceal from oneself, in order to allay guilt, the nature of this aggression. Bartleby's verbal formula for refusing to work is, in this light, a perfect extension of such a strategy. He uses the conciliatory word for the obstinate action.

It is one of the ironies of the story that such a transparent formula, so unlikely of success, should in fact so often succeed. Of course, this is so only because the narrator is the perfect victim, one whose inhibitions prevent him from identifying the aggression behind the mask of his clerk's passivity. He does, on one occasion, struggle with Bartleby to make him say "will not," rather than "prefer not," as though that change alone would end the ascendancy the clerk has over him. But Bartleby wins that struggle, too, as he wins all the others. Eventually, the narrator even tries to identify with his victorious clerk, as though that might erase his own ignominy. In perhaps the only comic scene in the story, however grim it may also be, the narrator catches himself using the same expression. He tells us that "somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word 'prefer' upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions." Bartleby's formula for domination has not been lost on the other employees, either; and the lawyer finds that they too are, quite unconsciously, using the expression themselves. For instance, with the employee named "Turkey":

"Oh, prefer? oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer—"
"Turkey," interrupted 1, "you will please withdraw."
"Oh certainly, sir, if you prefer that I shouid."

They identify with Bartleby, not for his depressions, the emptiness of his life, or his isolation from the world, but because of their intuitive sense that it is all a purposeful struggle for power, a struggle they see Bartleby win each day in the office. They rightly understand he is the aggressor who seems never to get caught.

Up to now, Melville has preserved a certain dramatic ambiguity. His narrator, for all the transparency of his rationalizations, has not been without at least some measure of justification for his inaction. His clerk has done good work in copying. And we can almost sympathize with the lawyer's continued sense that so mild a man can be tolerated and, perhaps in time, even reasoned with. (Bartleby's passive suffering has its demoralizing effect on the reader, too.) In addition, the narrator often takes his submission with a light heart. There is almost something comic about the way thoughts of decisive action (by "intimating the unalterable purpose of some terrible retribution very close at hand"), are immediately reversed ("I half intended something of the kind. But upon the whole, as it was drawing towards my dinner-hour, I thought it best to put on my hat and walk home for the day"). We might almost think that some comic resolution of the conflict is also at hand.

What does happen, however, is not in the least bit comic. The narrator recognizes, however slowly, how deranged his clerk is, with his catatonic depressions, his emaciation, his unending obstinacy. Concluding that Bartleby is the "victim of innate and incurable disorder," he decides at last to tell him that his "services were no longer required." On his first attempt, he makes the mistake of trying to reason with Bartleby, forgetting that one cannot reason with an incurable disorder. But when he has failed to voice the dismissal, he achieves his clearest sense that the problem is within himself. He tells us that "I strangely felt something superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe one bitter word.…" The old inhibition is still in force, not permitting a word in anger. Bartleby, however, as though sensing the imminence of dismissal, fights back with his own peculiar weapons. He declares that, henceforth, he will do no further work of any kind. It would appear that this is too much, even for the narrator. As politely as possible, he tells him at last to go. True, he gives the clerk six days' notice, not the usual thing with employees who will do no work whatever. But the termination, he says, is "unconditional." The struggle, for these men, may be more against inner forces than against each other, but it is as grim and ruthless, in its way, as the shedding of blood.

When the time is up, Bartleby is, of course, still there, standing in his corner motionless. Surely something now must give, we think. There is nothing more for the clerk to refuse to do, no more threats left for the lawyer to make. Something does give, and it is that which has been increasingly compromised from the beginning—the narrator's sanity. He was able to persuade himself, once before, that Bartleby was a valuable acquisition. Now he takes one further step out of reality. He gives Bartleby severance pay, gives him instructions for locking the office and leaving the key, bids him goodby and farewell, and walks home "pluming" himself on his "masterly management in getting rid of Bartleby." In short, he concludes the clerk will go because he, the narrator, assumes it. As he tells us, "I assumed the ground that depart he must; and upon that assumption built all I had to say." This is infantile belief in the omnipotence of thought, to think something will happen because one has assumed it will. But at least it is madness with a method, since he has controlled his violence—that is, the greater problem, for him, than even Bartleby. This he has achieved, and he takes consolation in it: "The beauty of my procedure," he writes, "seemed to consist in its perfect quietness. There was no vulgar bullying, no bravado of any sort, no choleric hectoring, and striding to and fro across the apartment, jerking out vehement commands.…"

The next morning, however, having "slept off the fumes of vanity," he is realistic enough to wonder if his clerk has really gone. When he finds Bartleby still in the office, he is reluctant to give up his "doctrine of assumptions," as he calls it. He momentarily imagines acting as though Bartleby has really gone, pretending not to see him, and walking "straight against him as if he were air." It is crazy thinking, and he recoils from it. As if to recover his sanity, his freedom of action, and his rightful authoritv all at one stroke, he finally gives expression to his anger and advances on Bartleby "in a sudden passion." When Bartleby replies, as dispassionately as ever, that he would prefer not to leave, the violence which has begun to leak out can no longer be kept from consciousness, although the lawyer is still not without his defenses. He thinks of a murder committed in a business office, one which involved others, not Bartleby and himself: "I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitted himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into the fatal act.…" The idea of killing is there, but the names have been changed. It is a good example of how "free" association, like dreams, reveals more than one knows.

Nothing, however, has changed. Bartleby is still there, and the narrator tries to "fancy, that in the course of the morning, at such time as might prove agreeable to him, Bartleby, of his own free accord, would emerge from his hermitage, and take up some decided line of march in the direction of the door." As usual, the narrator's language is the rhetoric of the lawyer, blurring the outlines of his own thinking. He is, to put it bluntly, reduced to the point of merely wishing that his clerk would prefer to go. The situation is as intolerable as ever; another defense against his own anger must now be found and another step taken out of the real world. He adopts a fantasy, less rational even than the magical thinking of his "doctrine of assumptions." He decides that he has a mission, predestined from eternity, to keep and care for Bartleby! Thus he converts the ignominy of defeat into the exalted idea of a divine purpose. The humiliation of defeat, which he cannot erase at the risk of murderous violence, he dispels with a delusion of grandeur.

Such a retreat from reality is shocking and gives the full measure of how costly his inhibition has become. He writes that "gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine, touching the scrivener, had been all predestined from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence.… At last I see it. I feel it; I penetrated to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content." This is the contentment of an all-but psychotic delusion. We have a vivid illustration of the premise that the line between neurosis and psychosis can often not be clearly drawn. The narrator is not psychotic, but this delusion is. And we have, too, an example of how the bizarre elements of psychosis may be themselves part of the individual's efforts to save himself and his integration in the world. With this delusion, the narrator at least escapes from a hell in which he can no longer live. And he is able to conclude, with no sense of humiliation or despair: "Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen.… I shall persecute you no more.…"

The narrator has not run from the world altogether, and his sense of reality helps to determine his next move. He becomes worried by the fact that his professional colleagues and acquaintances begin talking about the strange creature, the apparition, standing immovable in the middle of his office. The narrator's divine purpose has not been revealed to them, and the lawyer's reputation and practice is threatened. The narrator also has the queer idea that Bartleby will outlive him and so gain final possession of the office! This idea we can perhaps ascribe to his inveterate equating of conflict with murderous violence. Children often have murderous thoughts against their parents with the gratifying, and seemingly innocent, thought that they will "one day" outlive them. There is no reason for the narrator to care who possesses the premises when he is dead and gone. But the fear makes sense as another defense against his own murderous wishes. We can presume that, on the point of losing his profession, his violent wishes must be at their most intense. And so he projects them onto Bartleby, and imagines the clerk will outlive him (that is, might kill him). In any case, the narrator, as is the case with any neurotic, must decide how sick he is going to be. To put it differently, he must decide how much loss of adjustment in the external world he will tolerate in the interests of resolving inner problems. The choice is not always a conscious one, but it must always be made. Deciding he will not give up his profession, he does the only thing left to do. Unable to force Bartleby to go, he packs his own bags and moves his office elsewhere.

There is an utterly poignant moment when everything is moved, and Bartleby is left motionless in the middle of the naked room. Although their lives are highly disparate, each is pursuing the dictates of inner necessity. Bartleby remains uncompromising, although now he is left with nothing, while the narrator runs from conflict, but hangs on to his profession. Bartleby, of course, is the more forlorn figure, and the lawyer, even now, feels sympathy and self-reproach for leaving. The reader, too, is likely to feel more compassion for the scrivener. But one must beware the tactics of depression. The lawyer seems to have learned the lesson, and he goes.

The remainder of the story illustrates one last fact about the neurotic. Reality sometimes protects them from realizing the full proportions of their own malady. When the new tenants find Bartleby "haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry at night," the narrator is appealed to as the person responsible for having left him there. He agrees to speak to Bartleby because, as he tells himself, he might otherwise be "exposed" in the newspapers. What it is that he might be exposed for, he does not go into. It is, presumably, the old guilt born of latent violence which makes him vulnerable to intimidation. Back he goes to the old office and to more "reasoning" with Bartleby. At this point a most extraordinary thing happens, more bizarre and incomprehensible than anything that has gone before. After failing to persuade Bartleby to leave the office (as though that were ever possible) and failing to persuade him to take up some other profession (as though that were ever the problem), the narrator invites Bartleby to come home with him: "'Bartleby,' said I, in the kindest tone I could assume under such exciting circumstances, 'will you go home with me now—not to my office, but my dwelling—and remain there till we can conclude upon some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure? Come, let us start now, right away."'

Nothing is more certain than that, once lodged with the narrator, Bartleby will prefer to remain. And in light of his failures with the scrivener to date, he could hardly expect to have the strength to then force him to leave. Yet he tells us that this invitation is one "which had not been wholly unindulged before." One hardly knows at first what to make of this folly. It is comprehensible only as the last and most extreme gesture of defense. His leaving the office has not worked; he is back and responsible for the clerk all over again. Trapped by an unconscious guilt which makes him fear "exposure," there is nothing else to do except take up the association; but at least in the privacy of his home, away from the prying eyes of the world. And the scrivener's demented strategy of passive and depressed suffering has always had its effect on the narrator. Fortunately for the narrator, Bartleby replies: "'No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all."'

This obstinacy has its measure of grandeur, too. One finds such uncompromising stubbornness in the rages of the infant, where Bartleby's malady may indeed have had its origin. In any case, we shall never know the full extent of the narrator's capacity for neurotic accommodation, since, through no doing of his (he would say through no fault of his,) Bartleby is led unprotesting to the tombs. The lawyer visits him there, and finds him "standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall." The narrator has another one of his revealing free-associations, imagining that "all around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves." It takes little analysis, at this point, to perceive that he has projected again his own guilt. It is the guilt which prevented him from sending the scrivener to prison in the first place, and which now makes him feel responsible for his being there.

Bartleby, now that he is in prison, declares that he "prefers not to dine today." He always has new measures of obstinacy to refute the world. And so, when the narrator finds him later at his wall, he is "strangely huddled at the base …, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the stones." In death, his foetal position links him again to the infant. This equation between depressed obstinacy and the infant is an explanation for the sympathy and compliance such men can extort from the world. All suffering children are victims, since they have not yet the freedom to create their own problems. And so it is difficult for the reader to break the spell with the thought that Bartleby has killed himself, and with as much freedom to do otherwise as any of us possesses.

The narrator seeks at the end to explain the scrivener as the victim of his previous work in a dead letter office, which occupation fatally intensified an already "pallid hopelessness." The irony of the story is sharpest at its conclusion. At the beginning, the narrator had said that a description of himself was necessary for "an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented." But he has never understood the scrivener, beyond the dim sense that he is a "bit deranged." And attributing derangement to the effects of a dead-letter office is sentimental, and simplistic. But, above all, he does not understand that for the greater dramatization of his own inner conflicts, for his own perilous touch of madness, he himself has been the chief character. He can live in the world only as long as a passive avoidance of conflict is allowed him, and as long as anything which in the least disturbs the violence within him is kept away. Such neurotics are not often spared through an entire lifetime all conflict except the passivity of an obstinate clerk.