Melville's title itself, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street" indicates the significance of the setting as well as characterizing it. For, the lawyers chambers look upon a white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft and a lofty brick wall, while the other chambers have little if no views. Bartleby works in a corner by the folding doors behind a screen and has a window that "commanded at present no view at all. After Bartleby works under these conditions for some time, he begins to say "I would prefer not to" when asked by his employer to perform certain tasks. Eventually, the "inscrtable scrivener" retreats whenever possible "into his hermitage" of folding wall and viewless window.
Even when the lawyer moves to another office and the screen is folded leaving him the "motionless occupant of a naked room," Bartleby does not move. He haunts the building until he is taken the the Halls of Justice. There at the prison, Bartleby merely stands facing a high wall; he loses all will to live and dies, huddled against a wall where the lawyer discovers him with his eyes open. The walls that have closed Bartleby from human contact and from seeing nature outside have deprived him of one of man's most basic needs, that of companionship. Sadly, Bartleby accepts this isolation, even "prefering" it. But, it kills him. After his death, the lawyer learns that Bartleby had worked in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which "he had been suddenly removed by a change in administration." There, too, he was isolated.
The walls around Bartleby--his environment--affect him greatly, reducing him to a passive man. This desolation in Bartleby even begins to affect the other men who start to use his word prefer, and it affects the lawyer who himself becomes passive about ridding himself of Bartleby. As the walls close in on Bartleby, he retreats into himself more and more until, in his isolation behind walls, he dies, tragically huddled at the base of a wall.
Melville's subtitle "A Story of Wall Street" conveys the distant and often conflicting relationships between employers and employees that occurred in his time. In a way, Bartleby becomes symbolic of the growing distance in the late 1800s between employer and employee; as he is set apart by folding walls and viewles windows, his depersonalization occurs a result of this isolation; he is the estranged worker in an uncaring system. A thesis for Melville's story could establish the relationship between the walling out of Bartleby from his employer and his passive resistance and eventual retreat.
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