When Bartleby first starts “preferring not” to do certain tasks that the Lawyer assigns to him (such as copyediting his own work), the Lawyer keeps him on as an employee because he still finds Bartleby to be efficient at other tasks. At the same time, the Lawyer starts to become frustrated with Bartleby and inwardly criticizes the man’s passivity, using a metaphor in the process:
To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap.
The metaphor here—in which the Lawyer visualizes goading Bartleby as attempting to “strike fire with [his] knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap”—communicates the effectiveness of Bartleby’s passive resistance. Striking one’s knuckles against a bar of soap would never produce fire, the same way that the Lawyer attempting to incite “some angry spark” in Bartleby would never be successful. This figurative language helps readers understand just how consistent Bartleby’s “passiveness” is at this point in the story.
