Lovely Literature

I think there must be more to Bartleby than meets the eye. He is a peculiar character and he is static throughout the entire story. His behavior is motivated by the fact that he was fired from his previous job at the Dead Letter Office. Apparently something huge must have happened that put the thought into his head that he was to copy down and copy down only because he never "preferred" to do anything else. He must have been either coddled at his old job or the other extreme, terribly put down so that he was not confident in what he could do. Then again, he could just simply be lazy and literal, like those Amelia Bedelia books I used to read when I was younger.

I believe the information about the Dead Letter Office is withheld until the end so that the reader can identify whatever they believe with Bartleby. It would kill the story and give the reader a preconceived notion about Bartleby if he added that fact in earlier in the story. This background though is not near enough to describe Bartleby. He had to have gone through some kind of traumatic time to make him so passive aggressive and complacent. It's weird how a character can be so interesting and compelling even though he does not change throughout the entire story and he seems to be very flat.