Charity and Its Limits Theme Analysis

Through most of Bartleby, the Scrivener, The Lawyer treats Bartleby with what most reasonable people would describe as great charity. When he catches Bartleby in the office on the weekend and deduces that Bartleby must be secretly living there, The Lawyer is initially annoyed, but then realizes how lonely it must feel to live in a usually-busy office building while it’s completely empty during the weekend. Rather than fire or reprimand Bartleby, The Lawyer decides to keep Bartleby on as an employee and not mention his living situation whatsoever. Then, even after Bartleby ceases doing any work at all and just spends his days staring out the window with no view, The Lawyer still keeps Bartleby employed in the spirit of charity. Later, when The Lawyer learns that his reputation and business are threatened by Bartleby’s behavior, he finally does fire Bartleby, but The Lawyer still gives him a generous severance.

And though The Lawyer does abandon Bartleby by moving his office (after Bartleby “prefers not” to leave despite being fired), The Lawyer returns to try to help Bartleby when it becomes clear that the next tenant plans to call the police on the scrivener. There, the Lawyer offers Bartleby anything he can think of—a clerkship in a dry-goods store, a bartending job, and even offers to let Bartleby come live with him until they can work out an arrangement. And, finally, when Bartleby is wasting away in prison, The Lawyer’s guilt pushes him to be charitable once more—not to the point of claiming Bartleby and having him removed from prison, but enough to pay someone at the prison to cook for his former employee. The Lawyer’s charitable behavior in nearly every instance is highlighted by how uncharitably the rest of society treats Bartleby: without empathy and with complete indifference, locking him away in prison until a family member claims him or he dies.

And yet, the story is not one of The Lawyer’s heroic charity, because Bartleby refuses every single one of The Lawyer’s charitable efforts. Because of this, the story then forces its focus back onto The Lawyer’s charitable acts and raised two related though different questions. First, the story makes the reader question whether The Lawyer’s charitable acts were actually charitable enough. The Lawyer’s motives, after all, were not always entirely pure. From his initial charity of allowing Bartleby to continue to work for him, The Lawyer derives a self-satisfied and soul-soothing pleasure, congratulating himself that another less charitable boss would fire Bartleby and throw him out onto the street. And his later charitable offers, as with the offer of food at the prison, were motivated at least in part by a sense of guilt. In addition, The Lawyer’s charitable offers were always reasonable. They were generous, to be sure, but they weren’t, say, the kind of completely self-sacrificing charity that a figure like Jesus Christ might have offered. The Lawyer tried to “do what he could.” He never tried to do more.

The story therefore leaves open the question of whether things might have turned out differently if The Lawyer had practiced a more radical and total kind of charity. And in asking this question the story asks whether it is acceptable to ever limit one’s charity, as doing so is essentially a writing off of other people under the guise of being “reasonable” about every person’s responsibility to be responsible for him or herself. And yet in Bartleby’s constant refusals of all attempts to help, the story also raises the possibility that Bartleby would have refused all charity, no matter how complete. And by extension, the story suggests that total, radical charity, free of any sort of personal baggage or hesitancy, might be either beyond the grasp of any human to achieve or, even if achievable, not enough to bridge the gap between people.