Bartleby and the Narrator, Simmel's Metropolitans

In Melville’s “Bartleby,” both the narrator and Bartleby are examples of Georg Simmel's “metropolitan persons,’ respectively defined by the money economy: the narrator represents the blasé, ever-rational and impersonal metropolitan while Bartleby is a manifestation of “the narrower type of intellectual individuation of mental qualities” that arise from differentiation of labor (Simmel 58).

The narrator exhibits the traits normally attributed to the city-dweller: his interpersonal relations (at least those we see) are strictly rational. He keeps Turkey and Nippers employed so that he might have one functional scrivener on duty at any given time. Likewise, he cannot retain Bartleby after he effectually refuses to do any work. Although Bartleby evokes a sense of pious charity in him, the narrator’s economic rationale cannot allow Bartleby's haunting of the office.

Bartleby on the other hand, does not share this rationale. He is one that is driven by the city to exhibit one of those “most individual forms of personal existence, regardless of whether it is always correct or always successful”(Simmel 58). Bartleby certainly does not embody any sort of correct or productive lifestyle, but only an individual spirit that leads to “an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual”(Simmel 59). Bartleby is in no way bound by society and has differentiated himself from the rest of mankind, and has become valuable as a result of his “qualitative uniqueness.”

The question now concerns the narrators objective. Was it wrong of him to seek escape from Bartleby’s? Should he endure the haunting of this strange individual? The friction between the two is but a consequence of those historical and sociological conditions that make the city “a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification” of these respective types. As such, the narrator cannot be blamed for Bartleby's end, for in the end he attempted neither “to complain or condone but only to understand”(Simmel 60).