Most of Melville’s use of symbolism was with concepts and objects that could be applied

broadly, meaning they usually became motifs rather than explicit symbols. In Bartleby the
Scrivener, Melville has used the symbols of dead-letter, Wall Street, food, office etc. The
characters like Bartleby, Ginger Nut and many incidents of the story are also symbolic. Let’s
look at the symbols in a detailed manner.

Symbol of Walls:

Walls serve to create boundaries, and they disconnect people throughout the narrative of
Bartleby, the Scrivener. The Lawyer’s office is separated into two rooms by a ground-glass
folding door: one room where The Lawyer works and one in which his scriveners work.
When Bartleby is hired, The Lawyer places him inside his own office, but he installs a
“folding screen” (basically a temporary wall) so that The Lawyer cannot see Bartleby and
Bartleby cannot see him. Not only that, but the spot where The Lawyer stations Bartleby has
a window that used to look out onto back yards, but now, because of the construction of
new buildings, the window only looks out onto a brick wall.

Beyond the office’s layout, the very name of the street on which the office is located, Wall
Street, symbolizes the disconnected isolation within. The office’s address is never actually
written out in the story; instead it is always written in the format “No. – Wall Street.” By
keeping the office address vague, the office itself comes to stand in for all of Wall Street,
implying that the disconnection apparent in The Lawyer’s office is in fact characteristic of
the entirety of New York’s business sector.

By the story’s end, walls take on an even more menacing quality, as when Bartleby is
shipped off to prison, he is held not in a cell, but in the courtyard in the prison’s very center,
surrounded by walls of extreme thickness. Although he is alone in this huge yard, which
would itself serve as a symbol of disconnected isolation, The Lawyer notes (when he visits
Bartleby) that he can see the eyes of all the thieves and murderers who are locked away in
their cells peering down on Bartleby. So, although Bartleby can see other human beings and
they can see him through the cracks in the walls, the walls themselves serve to disconnect
and isolate these felons from each other, much how the walls in The Lawyer’s office
separated Bartleby from the other employees and The Lawyer himself. The walls, then,
come to symbolize not just the disconnection on Wall Street, but the disconnection that is a
part of human life.

Symbol of Dead Letters:

Dead-letter is the most important symbol of the story. The author shows the dead-letters as
one of the clues for Bartleby’s strange behavior. Besides that, the dead-letters here suggest
many things. A few months after the death of Bartleby, various rumors were heard. One of
the rumors was about his life immediately before joining the author’s office. The rumor was
this that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in a Dead-letter office in Washington. The
author finds it difficult to express the emotions which seize him.

The dead-letters are annually burned by the cartload. Sometimes from out of the folded
papers the pale clerk, Bartleby, took a ring, while the finger it was meant for moldered in
the grave. The person to whom a banknote was sent for alleviating his suffering, did no
more eat or drink. Hope was conveyed through a letter for someone who died unhoping;
these letters were sent on errands of life but actually they did speed to death. To read all
those dead letters, intended for people who are dead or gone, must have been so
depressing that it drove Bartleby slowly to his apathy and emotional attachment. The dead
letters also suggest the drudgery of the emerging middle-class, blue-collar job. Sorting
letters day in and day out could eventually be difficult for anyone to endure for a long time,
and such repetitive tasks are a common source of depression for some employers. By
making them dead-letters, Melville makes the depressing nature of such a task more
explicit. When Bartleby changes his job, he is willing to write letters but when he is asked to
read them he would “prefer not to.” For a short time he finds some satisfaction in the
creation rather than the destruction of letters, but finally he is unable to do even that.

The dead-letters here are also suggestive of Melville’s novel Moby Dick. Some critics who
look at Bartleby the Scrivener as a comment on Melville’s life, believe the “dead-letters”
may represent his unpopular novel, such as Moby Dick. These novels, like the dead-letters,
may be “errands of life”, offering the reader great insight into their life, but the novels, like
the letters, have no one to read them.

Symbol of Office:

The Office does have a more than a few things in "Bartleby the Scrivener". The office as a
space for human relationships is a central symbol in Melville's story and he uses the space as
a kind of odd experimental ground, upon which he tests the limits of personal interaction.
This is highlighted by the fact that we really don't see any of the characters outside the
office. Sure, the Narrator, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut must all go somewhere after
work, but we don't know anything about their home lives. Instead, we just witness the
trivial, often impersonal ways in which they communicate with each other in the workplace.

Melville also touches upon an important cultural reference that his contemporary readers
would have picked up on immediately, the 1841 murder of Samuel Adams by John Colt. This
scandalous event, which took place in a deserted office, lurks in the background of Melville's
tale; as the Narrator comments, there's something about the strangely impersonal, limbo
space of the office that may have allowed that tragic event to take place. With this in mind,
we have to keep thinking about the significance of setting and the role of the office itself in
"Bartleby."
Symbol of Food:

Food is another important symbols of the story Bartleby the Scrivener. Food is a symbol,
suggestive of desire and avarice. Bartleby does not prefer to deal with desire and avarice
and is ultimately killed by food or lack of food. One of the peculiarities in Bartleby that the
author noticed is his aversion to eating. Bartleby lives on ginger nuts, and nothing else. The
author described it as an amusing thing.

Bartleby’s death is symbolically caused by his withdrawal into apathy. But physically his
death is caused by his refusal to eat or his preference not to eat. By that he actually
symbolizes that he does not prefer to engage in the avarice and greed of the authoritarian
world. Nippers and Turkey have food-related names. Ginger Nut is nicknamed for the food
cake he delivers to his co-workers.

Symbol of Death:

Bartleby and death seem to go together. He is described as if he were dead many times in
the story: like a ghost, pale, cadaverous, motionless. On multiple occasions the narrator
notes Bartleby would stare off in "dead wall reveries." The narrator himself speculates it is
Bartleby's job of sorting letters that were sent to people who are dead that overwhelmed
him. He says, "Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?" The letters take their toll on
Bartleby's soul. It is only a matter of time until he dies a literal death as well.

Symbolic Characters:

The characters in this story are themselves symbolic. Bartleby is the symbol of all those
isolated workers of the mechanized world who are totally devoid of any romantic value.
Bartleby’s situation in life and his working environment cut him off from nature and
afterwards from other men. His work environment is devoid of any human warmth—chilly,
dark, sterile. He loses all enthusiasm for this bleak world of business and disengages himself
from it, and ultimately dies. He also becomes a complementary character of the narrator; he
is a kind of double to the author. At the end, he becomes a kind of double for all humanity.

So, we see that Melville has used many objects and characters as symbols to express some
abstract ideas. The dead-letters symbolize death, food symbolizes avarice and desire and
the Wall Street symbolizes desolateness. All these things seriously affected the protagonist
Bartleby. Bartleby, Ginger Nut and other characters are themselves symbolic. Through the
use of symbols, Melville has brought out many universal and significant ideas.