Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener demonstrates the mentality of the “metropolitan” person George Simmel describes. Simmel’s idea is that the city’s focus on money numbs a person to the unique emotions and personality of the individual. When confronted with the overt individuality, the city person must react with a dispassionate logic. If he doesn’t, the mind may implode because the concentration and population of the city guarantees that there will be oddities everywhere. The lawyer of Bartleby is very much the metropolitan money man and an oddity is exactly what finds in Bartleby. However, he has already known the quirkiness of his previous two employees. It’s not that Bartleby is his first brush with strange characters; it’s that Bartleby has a different kind of strange about him. Simmel says that, “Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e., his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded.” Bartleby excites the mechanical mind of the lawyer with his indirect refusals to direct commands. This is certainly something the lawyer has never dealt with before, and his mind reverts to the “activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the depths of the personality,” as Simmel states. Bartleby’s behavior does not change, however, because the lawyer’s reaction does not consider the feelings of Bartleby in its reasoning. In fact, the reasoning is the problem. The lawyer only tries to make sense of Bartleby or save him, but he does not know anything truly deep about him. He observes Bartleby’s behavior, he tries to change it and escape it; he cannot do any of those things successfully because he is at the same time trying to put distance between himself and the feelings and thoughts behind the behavior. Once he finds out his reactions, or lack thereof, has put Bartleby in the hands of an even more detached institution, the lawyer realizes the impact Bartleby has left on him. It is too late, though, to save or understand Bartleby. The unemotional condition of the metropolitan described by Simmel masquerades as a safeguard against emotional chaos, but actually will eventually bring about the damage the lawyer experienced with Bartleby. One can be insensitive to strangers without much consequence, but constant contact between people requires some effort for genuine connection. The lawyer failed in his attempt because it was a one-sided understanding. Even with Bartleby gone, the enigma of his personality remains to forever to haunt the metropolitan lawyer.