For a bribe, he offers to make sure Bartleby is well-fed. One of the turnkeys at the Tombs, the prison where Bartleby is sent. One of them threatens a scandal if the narrator will not help them. The new tenants and the landlordĪfter the narrator moves to rid himself of Bartleby, the new tenants and the landlord of the old office come to the narrator to ask him to do something about Bartleby, who refuses to leave. He is named after the cakes he brings for the men. Thus Nippers is productive when Turkey is not, and vice-versa. His indigestion makes him irritable and angry in the morning, but as it fades he becomes more calm. He is a young man plagued, as the narrator tells us, by the two evils of ambition and indigestion. He and Nippers provide comic relief, and are caricatures rather than rounded characters. He is an elderly drunk, productive in the mornings but sloshed by the afternoons. He ends by 'preferring not to' eat, which kills him. Each time Bartleby utters it, he is refusing not only a task, but one of the rituals that make up a normal life. His trademark sentence, 'I would prefer not to,' marks his continuing disengagement from the world. Life itself is pointless to him, and he cannot pretend enthusiasm for it. Bartleby is incredibly passive, quiet, never becoming angry. The pale and forlorn scrivener, or legal copyist. Through Bartleby, the narrator sees his world and the human condition in a new and unsettling way. Bartleby exerts a strange power over him: the narrator is simultaneously repulsed and moved to pity, and he is powerless to compel Bartleby to do anything. He makes his living helping rich men deal with their legal documents, and he is convinced that the easiest path is always the best one.

An elderly man, and an 'eminently safe' one.

Melville scrivener