Though Bartleby’s most prominent quality is strangeness, Melville makes him real to us. It is, in fact, Bartleby’s strangeness that makes him so real. The world is teaming with men like Bartleby, men who live their lives in the lines of soup kitchens. Men who live on the support of Christian charity, until this sort of life becomes too much for them. Until the day, like Bartleby, they lay down in the grass and succumb to the demands of a nature that is indifferent to the plight of humanity.
We encounter the unbelievable strangeness of Bartleby shortly after we meet him. It is Bartleby’s strange behavior that strikes a chord in the heart of the narrator. This strangeness is what keeps the narrator from dismissing Bartleby on the spot: “had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. . . .But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but, in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me” (135). It is this folly by the narrator that leads him to be plagued throughout the story by the strange Bartleby. After this strange behavior by Bartleby I have to agree with Ginger Nut when he says “‘I think sir, he’s a little luny’” (136). What is most unbelievable about these opening incidents of the story is that Bartleby is not immediately dismissed by the narrator. Bartleby is indeed strange, but there is nothing unreal about him. As I noted earlier, there are many people in the world that are as strange as he, but what is most unbelievable is the way he is treated by the narrator.
Perhaps the narrator is attracted to the very strangeness of Bartleby that makes him so real to us. The narrator notes that it is his very peculiar behavior that makes him an asset to the office: “His steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation,
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