s of being appropriate vices for each man's respective age. Alcoholism is a vice that develops with time. Ambition arguably is most volatile in a man's youth. These characters provide valuable comic relief in what is otherwise a somber and upsetting tale. Melvilles purpose in making Bartlebys personality act complimentary to the narrators is to demonstrate the change in the narrator and therefore make his message accessible.Increasingly, Bartleby is described in ghostly terms, and a perceptive reader will soon realize that the ghost is in some ways the narrator's double. Yet, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor's hall all by himself (1120). Presumably the lawyer is also a bachelor. They may have more in common than immediately appears to be. Both are probably well acquainted with loneliness. This sense of loneliness and the ways in which Bartleby has been described in phantom terms are now connecting the two characters. Note how often we see Bartleby as phantom, as when the narrator roars his name until he appears. "Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage" (1118). Later, we learn that Bartleby haunts the building. Like a ghost, he lives in the office when no one else is there, when Wall Street is a desert. A landscape both completely unnatural and forlornly empty (1120). Once again connecting the characters through loneliness.The narrator senses that there are parallels between himself and the scrivener, and Bartleby's gloom infects him: "Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam" (1120). Here, the narrator truly connects with Bartleby and so gains a new perspective on himself and the connections between human beings. Bartleby's p...
