Legal contracts are drawn up and copied, “mortgages, and title-deeds”, these all having importance because they represent money being transferred based on laws of society. The lawyer and his clerks’ work thrives on words, although not in the literary fashion (the narrator makes a quip about how Byron would be bored with their words), but words nevertheless. Mere words for the narrator of “Bartleby the Scrivener” have weight, significance, and they evoke the idea of money. He says that it is a name “… which, I admit, I love to repeat for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion”. Look at the narrator’s vivid description of the name of his former employer John Jacob Astor at the beginning of “Bartleby the Scrivener”. Thesis Statement / Essay Topic #2: “Dead Letters” and Heavy Words in “Bartleby the Scrivener” By the closing sentence of “Bartleby the Scrivener”, the author may be saying that it is human nature to have faults however losing the ability to emote and connect with one’s surrounding world is perhaps the greatest tragedy an individual could go through or witness. When Nipper’s was on, Turkey’s was off and vice versa”. So Turkey and Nippers are quite the opposite of Bartleby, yet the main conflict that “Bartleby the Scrivener” presents is an internal one: that is, how is the narrator to deal with someone who appears to be void of any human attributes? Note also in the descriptions of Turkey and Nippers, there is some sort of organic mechanization in the way they work, and how their temperaments change: “Their fits relieved each other, like guards. It should be pointed out that the narrator’s problems with his other employees have to do with their unreliability, sloppiness, drunkenness, and flaring tempers. Bartleby is described as completely emotionless, at one point “… he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically”. The last line of Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” is “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Analyze this exclamation: it maybe that Melville is making a strong claim about what it means to act according to a certain concept of humanness, that being the characters other than Bartleby (Turkey, Nippers, Ginger Nut, and the narrator himself). Thesis Statement / Essay Topic #1: “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a Human Tragedy