The narrator of "Bartleby"

[Michael Bailey]

 alice wellintown wrote:

> cross,  we all hang on together. Apply the language of The Secret
> Integration, Mathematics, and the Y axis of that cross, the straight
> line of the Elect, is folded down along the X axis,

okay, am I amiss in thinking of glenn scheper at this juncture?

that's in addition to the image of the bowed head of the crucified Savior

but still not sure I apprehend your full intent with the reference

> a democratic
> preterit, castaways and orphans, can only be saved by the labor of and
> solidarity of fellow workers. What of his co-workers? Have they any
> chance to save Bartleby?
>

when Bartleby asks the lawyer if he cannot see why Bartleby refuses to
work, that is the moment I most favor the interpretation of Bartleby
as conscience.  The lawyer misinterprets this as eye trouble.   But
it's *his* vision that's flawed.

Therefore, if Bartleby is in fact insisting on the apparent
intolerable unrighteousness of the goings-on - then the lawyer's
blindness is the reason that the rest of the story is an apparently
exhaustive list of his virtuous responses to inexplicable perversity.
(to the point where I'm halfway ready to agree with him...)

the patriarchal gaze of the employer shows us Bartleby's co-workers
only as subservient and of incomplete competence.