The role of the government should be to facilitate individual freedom and moral rights in a country (Stevenson 53). Thus, organized religion and civil government are some of the major barriers to individual and moral freedom. According to Stevenson (47), transcendentalism philosophy argues that people can transcend the limitations of their physical aspects in order to achieve individual freedom and greater truths. First, it is necessary to define what transcendentalism philosophy entails.

From a philosophical approach, it is clear that Melville’s narrative is a reflection of transcendental ideas of the 18th and 19th centuries. Philosophical analysis of “Bartleby the Scrivener”īruce Michelson says “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a sad but funny pursuit of the understanding of “self” and other people… and is a predicament of human sensitive mind as it considers the demands of modern life. For instance, the transcendental ideologies of self-reliance and individual freedom appear to contradict with ethics at the workplace, thereby revealing the philosophical thinking of civil disobedience. However, it is convenient to analyze the story from a philosophical point of view. Many scholars have attempted to use different approaches to determine the cause of Bartleby’s character and its real-life implication, including philosophical, religious and ethical analysis of the character.

Throughout the story, Bartleby’s character changes from a polite, cool and firm scrivener to a ‘difficult-to-understand’ person who refuses to take his tasks at the office by using a simple phrase “I would prefer not to” (Wells 38). Written in 1853, Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A story of Wall Street” portrays the character of Bartleby, a “scrivener” hired to work in the narrator’s law office.

Melville scrivener