Primary Text: Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville

Excerpt from Leo Marx's article "Melville's Parable of the Walls." The Sewanee Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Autumn, 1953), pp. 602-627.

"Bartleby the Scrivener" is a parable about a particular kind of writer's relation to a particular kind of society. The subtitle, "A Story of Wall Street," provides the first clue about the nature of the society. It is a commercial society, dominated by a concern with property and finance. Most of the action takes place in Wall Street. But the designation has a further meaning: as Melville describes the street it literally becomes a walled street. The walls are the controlling symbols of the story, and in fact it may be said that this is a parable of walls, the walls which hem in the meditative artist and for that matter every reflective man. Melville also explicitly tells us that certain prosaic facts are "indispensable" to an understanding of the story. These facts fall into two categories: first, details concerning the personality and profession of the narrator, the center of consciousness of this tale, and more important, the actual floor-plan of his chambers.