Bartleby, the Scrivener Character Map

Bartleby, the Scrivener is about 14,000 words long and has twelve people in it, so nobody loses track of the cast. What a list of those twelve cannot show is what they are to each other, and in this story that is the whole point. This map charts the full public-domain text — 12 figures and 23 relationships, each carrying a short quote from the story, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Look at the kinds of line. Not one of the 23 is a parent, a child or a sibling. Nearly all of them are work: who employs whom, who copies beside whom, who fetches the cakes, who owns the building, who is paid to bring a prisoner his dinner. The single family tie in the story is a marriage between the prison’s grub-man and a wife who never appears. Bartleby himself has seven lines to seven people, and every one of them hires him, works next to him, runs his errands, evicts him or feeds him. The narrator remembers that he “had declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world.” The map draws that refusal as empty space.

Search a name to jump to it. Solid lines are kinship, dashed lines are unions and allegiances, dotted lines are social ties, and selecting a figure dims everyone they are not connected to. Select the narrator and nine of the other eleven stay lit; he is the employer, the tenant, the client and the visitor, and the story reaches everyone through him. Select Bartleby and the office stays lit, then the two men who put him out of the building, then the man paid to feed him. The names are Melville’s: the three clerks go by nicknames, the narrator by none at all.

Two honest notes. The only full names on the map belong to men who never enter the story: John Jacob Astor, whose name the narrator says three times in one paragraph because he loves to repeat it, and Monroe Edwards, a forger the grub-man remembers. And the map was made by software reading the story, so it can be wrong. It draws the narrator’s tie to each of his three employees twice, once as their employer and once as a colleague, so six lines stand where three would do. It files “the pale clerk” as a name for Bartleby, though in the text that phrase is the narrator picturing any clerk in the Dead Letter Office. And it leaves out the people the story only alludes to, Colt and Adams among them. Every line carries its quote so you can catch that kind of thing.

Who’s who in Bartleby, the Scrivener

The short version, for the reader who just needs the thread back. Every name here is on the map, with the passage that puts them there.

The narrator

An unnamed Wall-street lawyer, “an eminently safe man,” and the most-mentioned figure on the map. He is tied to nine of the other eleven. The map also knows him as “the lawyer” and by his office, Master in Chancery.

Bartleby

The scrivener, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.” Seven lines, none of them family. He says “I would prefer not to” thirteen times in the text, including when he is asked where he was born.

Turkey

The senior copyist, a “short, pursy Englishman” not far from sixty, steady before noon and reckless after it. He opens his speeches “With submission, sir,” and offers to black Bartleby’s eyes.

Nippers

The younger copyist, about five and twenty, “the victim of two evil powers—ambition and indigestion.” His bad hours are the mornings, so he and Turkey are never difficult at the same time: “Their fits relieved each other like guards.”

Ginger Nut

The office boy, some twelve years old, sent by his father to study law at one dollar a week. His line to Bartleby is an errand: he brings the ginger-nuts, which are all Bartleby is seen to eat.

John Jacob Astor

The richest man in America, dead before the story begins, and a client the narrator is proud of. One line, to the narrator, who loves to repeat the name because “it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it.”

The lawyer at Wall-street

The tenant who takes the rooms after the narrator moves out to escape Bartleby. The text calls him only “Mr. B—.” He tells the narrator “you are responsible for the man you left there,” and turns Bartleby out of the room.

The landlord

The “portly person” who owns the building. He demands that the narrator take Bartleby away, and when that fails he sends to the police. The line from him to Bartleby is one of only two hostile lines on the map.

Mr. Cutlets

The grub-man at the Tombs, “a broad meat-like man, in an apron,” paid by the narrator to give Bartleby the best dinner he can get. Four lines, and the only marriage on the map.

Mrs. Cutlets

The grub-man’s wife, named twice in one sentence of invitation and never seen. Her one line is to her husband, and it is the only family tie in the story.

Monroe Edwards

A real forger of the 1840s. The grub-man takes Bartleby for another of the kind, “pale and genteel-like,” and recalls that Edwards “died of consumption at Sing-Sing.” One line, to the man who remembers him.

The turnkey

The jailer who confirms the grub-man is what he says he is. The text has a second turnkey, who asks “Are you looking for the silent man?” The map keeps one.

Questions people ask about Bartleby, the Scrivener

Longer read: Bartleby Is Not a Story About Quitting — an essay on the same text, using the same map.