or wealthy corporate raider we're dealing with here; this is just a humble clerk. His capacity for resistance is therefore somewhat limited. If he's going to take a stand, then he's going to have to take a seat. And so he does—all of a sudden, right out of the blue, he stops working altogether.

We can't know for certain what's going through the young man's troubled mind; the most likely explanation is that he has some kind of depressive illness. But perhaps the theme of anti-capitalism might provide an alternative explanation. Maybe he's so thoroughly disillusioned with all the poorly paid work he's had to do for his boss's well-heeled clients that he's developed a moral objection to being just another small cog in a giant, inhuman corporate machine.

In any case, Bartleby's unique mode of defiance has a disruptive effect on the daily routine of the lawyer's office. The wheels of commerce may not have ground to a halt, but they do at least slow down for a little while. Bartleby's lawyer boss has never seen anyone quite like this strange young man before. He's so flummoxed that he's at a loss to know how to handle this unprecedented act of sullen defiance in his midst.

Eventually, and inevitably, force prevails and settles the matter once and for all. One could interpret this as a subtle critique of how the capitalist system often silences those who engage in peaceful protest against it. But although Bartleby as some kind of proto-anarchist is ultimately unsuccessful in his defiance of the capitalist system and all its workings, he does at least point the way towards a potential strategy of peaceful mass resistance.

Many critics see this excellent story as a critique of the way that American society was beginning to embrace capitalism as a doctrine that would come to transform and define it. Note the way that this story is set symbolically in Wall Street, the heart of the new financial workings. In fact, walls are a common symbol in the story, and are used to indicate the way in which this emerging financial system actually imprisoned and inhibited people. Consider the way that the windows of the office only look out onto more walls in every direction:

At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious skylight shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom... In [the other] direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade...

Bartleby himself seems to spend a lot of time focusing blankly on the wall he can see from his working station, and the lawyer comes to refer to this as being lost in a "dead-wall reverie." Bartleby is a character who spends his entire life living in a sort of living prison, and it is therefore ironic that he finally dies in prison.

Bartleby therefore seems to be used by Melville to profoundly question America's unequivocal embrace of capitalism by raising the vexing question of how this will impact our human freedom. Bartleby is forced to work carrying out meaningless labours in exchange for a small salary which therefore limits him profoundly as a human in terms of who he is and his potential to develop. The way in which capitalism is presented in this excellent story therefore forces us to consider what we have lost through our whole-hearted acceptance of capitalism, and how that acceptance might actually have limited our freedom.