In several subtle moments throughout the story, Melville foreshadows Bartleby’s death. For example, when the Lawyer first meets Bartleby, he describes him as “motionless” and “pallid” (or pale and feeble due to ill health). In fact, the Lawyer describes Bartleby as “pallid” five different times over the course of the short narrative. He also uses the word “cadaverous” (or corpse-like) several times, describing Bartleby’s “cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance,” “cadaverous reply,” and “cadaverous triumph.”
In a more overt example of foreshadowing, in the middle of the story the Lawyer describes a haunting vision he has of Bartleby on his death bed:
Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet.
Referring to Bartleby’s “pale form […] laid out, among uncaring strangers” immediately conjures images of a funeral, as does the inclusion of a “winding sheet” (or sheet in which a corpse is buried). Calling this a “presentiment” (or intuitive feeling about the future) tells readers that Bartleby’s death is likely to come to pass.
All this foreshadowing prepares readers for Bartleby’s eventual demise. Though it may seem, at first, like Bartleby’s passive resistance to labor is an empowering anti-capitalist stance, this eerie and haunting energy tells readers that something deeper is going on. This proves to be true when Bartleby’s passive refusal eventually leads him to refuse food and to die in prison. Bartleby’s death raises the question of if his refusal is not to work or exploitation but to existence itself.
