"I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby."
Throughout this complicated, strange, and somewhat sorrowful tale, death is a common theme. The narrator's account of Bartleby is corpse-like. Neat, pitiably respectable, and forlorn, all words that could be used to describe the atmosphere of a funeral home. He is pale and cold, much like a dead body. Furthermore, he is all around associated with death. The man eats little, lives nowhere, and towards the end of the story spends days and days staring at a brick wall. Creepy? Very. His emotions aren't human. He is calmly and civilly disobedient, which is unheard of. At the end of the story, Bartleby himself dies in prison. Yet even after death, the narrator finds more connections Bartleby had with death. He was rumored to have worked in the Dead Letter office, where the letters of the deceased and missing go. What a truly depressing existence indeed.
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