Character Analysis
Ah, Nobody
Bartleby is one of the most famous characters in all of American literature. And what is he famous for?
Nothing! He's famous for nothing. He does nothing. He is nothing. He works as a copyist, writing out legal documents in a law office. He's essentially a human photocopier before there were photocopiers. And then, perhaps sensing the futility of being a human photocopier, he quits copying, and then he stops doing anything, and then he dies. You don't even learn anything about him. Does he have a family? What is his past? You don't know. From the beginning to the end of the story, you can say, with the narrator, "the man you allude to is nothing to me—he is no relation or apprentice of mine…I know nothing about him…he has done nothing for me now for some time past." (2.184-186)
If Bartleby is nothing, though, he is a very active, overweening nothing—a nobody that takes up space. Sitting, doing nothing, he pushes his employer right out of his offices; he sows consternation and woe; he almost incites a riot. "Nothing so irritates an earnest person as a passive resistance," the lawyer remarks, (2.56) and no one resists with the dull, flat passivity of Bartleby. He is the "nothing" that irritates; the thing that isn't there which gets in the way. He is an anonymous, flat blank that doesn't move. And then he dies and he's even more anonymous and blank. Death is the nothing no one gets by.
Ah, Everybody
And so, in being nobody and nothing, Bartleby is, sort of, everybody. It's like he reduces being human to its essence; the real self, the truest self, is the self that won't. You know who you are by what you aren't. The lawyer bends with every wind; he'll do anything for anybody, and so he's not anyone in particular. Bartleby's negative encompasses everything. Whatever you refuse, Bartleby refuses it, too. Whenever you say "no" (or "I prefer not to") the spirit of Bartleby is there.
And of course that's most true when you say "no" to everything, as Bartleby does at the very end, when he "lives without dining" (2.24). Bartleby doesn't so much show that nobody can be everybody, but rather that everybody is nobody. "Ah, humanity!" (2.252)
Bartleby's Timeline