The tone of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” primarily moves between confused, angry, and grief-stricken, depending on how the Lawyer is feeling toward Bartleby at the time. After the opening of the story—in which the Lawyer’s tone is fairly even-keeled as he informs readers about his other employees and the events leading up to Bartleby’s hire—the Lawyer is consistently in a state of emotional crisis. When Bartleby starts refusing to do the work that is required of someone in his position, the Lawyer first is bewildered and this comes across in his confused and perplexed tone.
The major tonal shifts come as Bartleby’s passive resistance escalates, and the Lawyer alternates between moments of immense pity and grief (on Bartleby’s behalf) and anger. The following passage captures the moment when the Lawyer’s pity turns into repulsion and rage:
My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not.
While the Lawyer initially acted charitably toward Bartleby because he pitied him and believed he could be helped, here his tone becomes cold and resigned as he concludes that it’s only “up to a certain point” that “the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections.” In other words, his empathy for Bartleby has started to turn into “repulsion.” This repulsed, angry tone only increases, as is evident, a few pages later, when the Lawyer describes Bartleby as “a millstone […] not only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear.”
The Lawyer’s tone does change once more after the final climactic sequence—as Bartleby goes to prison and ultimately dies there—becoming more empathetic and desperate once again, leaving readers with the final pitying exclamation of, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”
