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Bartleby the Scrivner

Bartleby the Scrivner

"I am a rather elderly man," says the lawyer-narrator of "Bartleby" (p. 984), and thus begins a tale which is full of contradictions and gaps and which has been read in various and apparently opposite ways.  By introducing his story in the first person using  "I am,” the lawyer mimics not only the power of God but also the originary gesture of all biographies the idea that the self is knowable. 
Having made this gesture, however, the narrator undermines it, for he equivocates, then denies that the self is at all knowable. This pattern is repeated throughout the story in relation to all the characters the lawyer attempts to characterize, including himself. For example, he says that although he could tell us a thing or two about other scriveners he has known, he will concentrate on Bartleby, the "strangest" scrivener he ever saw. However, he then admits the following: 
While of other law-copyists [scriveners] I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man.  Bartleby was one of those beings of which nothing is ascertainable except from

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