SOURCE: "Towards 'Bartleby the Scrivener'," in The Stoic Strain in American Literature, edited by Duane J. MacMillan, University of Toronto Press, 1979, pp. 19-41.

Stern is an American critic. In the following excerpt, he assesses critical perspectives on "Bartleby, the Scrivener."

When Ishmael asserted that the changefulness of life 'requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it,' he was offering a jocular way to handle the shock and horror that accompany the discovery of our human oneness in our common, mortal victimization by the conditions of life. 'Bartleby the Scrivener' is a tale of that discovery, not by seafarers in the vastness of natural force and space, but by landlubbers in claustral immurement.

Some critics are tempted to find stoic heroism in the pallid law-office clerk and to dismiss the lawyer-narrator as merely a wicked victimizer. Other critics more...