#12

In Herman Melville's story of "Bartleby", the unnamed narrator struggles between being charitable to the passive resistant Bartleby, or seeking justice to Bartleby's blase stubbornness to perform the tasks asked of him. The narrator is a Church-going Christian who views himself and Bartleby as "brothers of Adam". Thus, his good Christian "charity" comes into play when providing Bartleby with shelter, a job, and even money despite his disarming defiance. At the same time, the narrator is a lawyer and will also try to seek the scales of justice when dealing with the "ghost" of Bartleby. Bartleby does not comply with any of the narrator's requests, from giving information to his past to dropping off mail at the post office, so by justice's standards, the narrator has every right to dismiss Bartleby or even have him removed from the premises. Instead, the narrator and his law firm moves, leaving Bartleby to haunt his Wall Street office until he is finally imprisoned. The narrator is stuck like many Americans between the rock and the hard place of religious morality and democratic justice, just proving how "Bartleby, the Scivener: A Story of Justice" challenges economic dominance by passive resistance and the social conscious that comes with dealing in a money hungry nation.