This means that Bartleby spent his life destroying lost letters, letters that were meant to connect two people through shared language but failed at that task. The Lawyer then states that what is to be told next should be questioned by the reader, as The Lawyer has heard it through rumor only, and he goes on to say that those rumors indicate that before Bartleby began working at The Lawyer’s office, he had spent a number of years working at the Dead Letter Office. In the midst of the climactic sequence, The Lawyer abruptly stops telling the story of Bartleby’s passive resistance, which at this point is leading the scrivener to waste away in prison because he refuses to eat any food, and instead The Lawyer says that “imagination” on the part of the reader should be good enough to envision Bartleby’s end. This point is exemplified by the story’s end. So, the point-of-view of the story is in itself an example of language failing to create a perfect two-way relationship between storyteller and listener, between reader and writer. For example, The Lawyer never tells the reader his own name, and only refers to his employees other than Bartleby by their nicknames: Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut. It is entirely unclear without context what “rather elderly” means-is The Lawyer a middle-aged man who is being modest? A man near the very end of his life trying to be humble? Or is he simply a man in the midst of old age, not quite at the end, but further from his first breath than his last? The reader cannot know for certain the answer to any of these questions that the first sentence raises, because Bartleby, the Scrivener is told from the perspective of an unreliable-and often unspecific-narrator. The Lawyer, who narrates the entire story, describes himself in the first line as “a rather elderly man.” Presumably, The Lawyer knows his own age, but instead of passing that information along to the reader he chooses to describe himself as elderly-but he doesn’t just leave it at that, he calls himself “rather elderly.” It’s the “rather” that makes this opening sentence as nonspecific as it is. From its very first sentence, Melville signals to the reader that Bartleby, the Scrivener is a story in which language isn’t always meant to be taken at face value.
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