e four main issues embodied in Bartleby the scrivener: spiritual death, lost humanity, delusion, and verifiable truth. This paper will address each of these issues in light of the story and offer an explanation of MelvilleÆs purpose for the character.
The first issue, spiritual death, is the easiest to identify. In MelvilleÆs first description of Bartleby, he portrays him as ôpallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!ö (10). Throughout the story, he refers to BartlebyÆs pallor on many occasions, twice describes him as a ghost, and twice more as an apparition. Bartleby is extremely thin, wraithlike, seemingly the living dead. He epitomizes death on several levels, not just physically in terms of his pallor and emaciated appearance, but symbolically both as one who is without a life and also as one who represents spiritual death. Spiritual death eventually leads to physical death, as only those who are spiritually alive can walk intact from the present life into the next. Therefore, Bartleby is on a continuum that brings him closer and closer to death. Since he is at the beginning of the story already an embodiment of death, this is not a long trip. In the numerous definitions of ôdead,ö BartlebyÆs spectral presence is evident:
Deprived of life; -- opposed to alive and living; reduced to that state of a being in which the organs of motion and life have irrevocably ceased to perform their fun
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