The subtitle of this excellent story, to my mind, should
draw our attention to the way in which walls are a prevalent symbol in the story.
Consider how the setting of the narrator's offices are described. Not only are they
located on Wall Street, but they also have a view of nothing more than the walls of
other buildings:
At one end they looked upon the white wall of the
interior of a spacious skylight shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom... In
[the other] direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick
wall...
The high number of
walls and their significance makes us think of the theme of freedom and the way in which
the freedom of Bartleby becomes ever more restricted as the story takes its course. Note
the way in which Bartleby spends hours staring at the wall, so much so that the narrator
describes him as being lost in a "dead-wall reverie." Bartleby is a character who seems
to lack freedom in his life, and the high number of walls only serves to reinforce the
way that he is imprisoned by life.
The story thus seems to
be a meditation on the nature of human freedom. Is Bartleby the victim of the capitalist
system that we have today that forces people to exchange their labour for paltry wages?
Or is his lack of freedom more philosophically based as he struggles to grasp the
significance of his life and debates the meaning of his existence? Either view is
possible, but the subtitle of this story, giving us yet another reminder of the symbol
of walls and how they represent imprisonment, asks us profound questions concerning our
state of freedom and/or imprisonment in the world and the extent to which humans can
ever be truly free.
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