According to Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "Good literature substitutes for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through." Although this quote can be applied to a vast number of literary works, Bartleby the Scrivener by American author Herman Melville, best-known for his classic novel Moby Dick, contains many "experiences" which the reader may not be familiar with, due to the story being set in New York City on Wall Street during the early 1850's. In order to understand these "experiences," we must use specific literary elements found in Bartleby, such as setting, characterization, dialogue and some interesting metaphors/motifs which Melville inserted into the story to support the often strange plot.

             First of all, Melville describes the physical setting in which the narrator ("a rather elderly man") earns his living in Wall Street-"My chambers were upstairs at No._____ Wall Street. At one end, they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious skylight shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom." At the other end, "my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall. . . pushed up within ten feet of my window panes. . . " (62-63). .

             This description provides a rather eerie feeling of being trapped inside some kind of a prison and demonstrates the architecture of old New York City when the buildings were placed so close together as to convey a feeling of entrapment. Of course, this physical placement of the buildings still occurs in modern New York City, yet Melville adds that the lofty brick wall was "black with age and everlasting shade" (63), a symbol of the city's early industrial age when black smoke from the factories filled the skies and darkened everything around them.

             Before Melville introduces the reader to the main character, namely, Bartleby, he describes a secondary character named Ginger Nut, "a lad some twelve years old" whose father "was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart" (66).