light draws the narrator into depths of feeling that he did not know he was capable of. Part of Bartleby's power over the narrator is that the lawyer somehow sees Bartleby as a part of himself. He, too, has been forced to adapt to the business world. But while he has adapted and gone through the consequent numbing (previously unable to feel more than a "not unpleasing sadness"), Bartleby has been bludgeoned to exhaustion. Nothing pleases him about this world. The narrator is changing from this compassionless attitude and wants to help Bartleby. For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me (1120). The lawyer is changing, and is having feelings of sadness (about the human condition?) that he never admitted to himself before.We had been warned that the narrator is a safe man who thinks the easiest path is also the best (1109). His prudential feeling gets the better of his and his pity for Bartleby turns to repulsion (1121). The narrator's plight works through the themes of responsibility and compassion. His obligations, in one sense, are nothing. As far as Bartleby is a living, suffering being, and that both men are "sons of Adam," the narrator arguably should do all that he can. The narrators common sense causes him to come to the conclusion that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder (1121). He sees Bartleby as hopelessly sick. After asserting that after a certain point, pity becomes revulsion, he defends the transformation: "They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill" (1121). Yet the narrator goes on to describe the transformation as defensive. Although he denies the charge that the pity-to-repulsion change is due to selfishness, his explanation of the motives behind it seem like little more than a selfishness that is philos...
