How Does Bartleby The Scrivener Influence Society

Being ourselves is something we are encouraged to do. Our teachers and parents try to support us in doing what we like to do but somewhere along the way something goes wrong. As we get older, we are exposed to different things and innocence is lost. Others influenced our way of thinking and we began to criticize others. We began to view things as odd or strange because they were something out of the norm for us. In the 19th century, writers Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener”(1853) and “The Minister’s Black Veil”(1836) criticizing the unrealistic expectations we made amongst ourselves and what our actions, influenced by society, might lead others to do. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” and
The fact that the story takes place in Wall Street, which was known as a bustling center of business and finance even back in Melville's day, makes it more fascinating. It makes us question the kinds of human interaction that occurs in the workplace. The narrator’s office is occupied by a set of different men, whose relationships with each other seem to be purely professional. The men never seem to have any kind of relationship or speak to each other unless addressed by the lawyer, and the only thing the lawyer mentions about them is when they work best and his explanation of how their nicknames came to be. This impersonality of the characters is hugely significant because it suggests that the business-based world in which they operate has no room for personal interaction. It's evident that we don't learn anything about any of the characters beyond what they're like in the
The narrator places Bartleby’s desk by a window “with no view at all” in the his own office and placing a green screen “which might isolate Bartleby from [his] sight”(1489). Melville is trying to show how employers don’t give their employees privacy and don’t allow them to be themselves. The window in the text symbolizes restriction because there is no “view” therefore no freedom.
In the middle of the story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Bartleby is left in the office after the narrator moves his office. Bartleby “prefers not to” leave the building and soon another lawyer makes the narrator’s old office his own. The lawyer makes Bartleby leave but he stays “haunting the building”(1505). His presence makes others “concerned” while others “fear” him. It makes others uncomfortable seeing Bartleby in the building and it leads to them taking him