http://www.raleighcharterhs.org/faculty/acallanan/Bartleby_ChristianHumanism.

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The Classical and Christian traditions overlap considerably and are not limited to the virtues they prioritize, but they do prioritize different virtues. The Classical tradition prioritizes reason; the Christian tradition, love. The lawyer is inwardly divided between these virtues. He embodies the preeminent Classical value but not the preeminent Christian value. His actions and words to Bartleby and the grub-man suggest charity and friendship, but his disclosures about how he thinks and feels reveal that he is loveless. He is, therefore, more a humanist than a Christian--though not, perhaps, a humanist of whom Cicero or any other Classical author would whole-heartedly approve. As a Christian certainly, and, therefore as a Christian humanist, he is a failure.

, the lawyer is divided in a way that corresponds to the layout of his office--with

physical divisions that allow for only partial awareness.

his side of the lawyer's consciousness is Christian. The other, the humanist, rational, more self-interested side quickly takes over:

As a thinking and perhaps actively practicing Christianwhich nominally German-Calvinist Astor was not--the narrator is concerned about conscience and the requirements of charity. (The lawyer may not, however, be a regular churchgoer, since he intended, on the Sunday morning he mentions, "to hear a celebrated preacher" [650], which suggests nonattendance when the preacher is not celebrated.)

If the lawyer was not assisting in foreclosures or if they were not, at some level, troubling his Christian conscience, he might well be able to expel Bartleby immediately and with impunity.

As a failed Christian who does not acknowledge or admit his failing, the lawyer is a pretender. He is also, in Ciceronian terms, a pretend friend. Though no critic has suggested it, all this gives symbolic meaning to the grub-man associating the lawyer with "genteel-like ... forgers": "Did you know Monroe Edwards? ... he died of consumption at Sing-Sing. So you weren't acquainted with Monroe?" The lawyer replies, "No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers" (670). For one who sets such store at the start of the story by professional acquaintanceship with "the late John Jacob Astor" (636) as indicative of the soundness of his reputation as "an eminently safe man" (635), this imputed association with forgers is symbolically telling. Though apparently mistaken in thinking Bartleby a forger, the grub-man implies that the lawyer is himself one. As a false Christian and non-friend, the lawyer is a forger and also a forgery, although if he intends to deceive the reader, he also apparently wants to deceive himself. In being true to humanist reason but lacking in Christian love, the lawyer is divided in a way that corresponds to the layout of his office--with physical divisions that allow for only partial awareness. The lawyer and Bartleby are separated from the others in the office by ground-glass folding doors that obscure vision and allow for some vocal communication. On his own side of these doors, the lawyer is separated from Bartleby by a green folding screen that allows easy vocal communication but precludes visual observation. There are several ways in which his psyche corresponds to his divided office, as we shall see, but one psychological barrier is implied by the lawyer's revelation of a division in himself between compassionate sympathy and "prudential feeling." Upon discovering that Bartleby lives in his office, the lawyer feels "overpowering stinging melancholy" at his awareness, or assumption, of Bartleby's "misery" and even has a presentiment of Bartleby's body "laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet" (652). This side of the lawyer's consciousness is Christian. The other, the humanist, rational, more self-interested side quickly takes over:

Chisdes, Jonathan, and Sharon Gravett. "The Narrator in Melville's" Bartleby, the Scrivener": Morally Corrupt or Deep Humanitarian?."

The most widely accepted contemporary interpretations of "Bartleby" have centered upon the theme of the brotherhood of man or a variation thereof. Through Bartleby's passive resistance against all that the methodical law office serves, the unnamed narrator is gradually turned away from his prudent, and safe, and uncommitted position until he stands scorched by the blazing revelation that we are, all of us, at once interdependent and forlorn (132). Yet still there are critics who maintain the lawyer has no set of ethics at all--that everything he does is out of self-interest and is immoral. He's been effected by Bartleby and sees how all humanity is interconnected. Bartleby is a man who cares not who he hurts and harms. e rejects life. He is a man with many faults. Craver and Plante point out how rude Bartleby is when he goes so far as to order the narrator out of his own premises one Sunday morning (134). And they also say Bartleby is "both ungrateful and disdainful" (135). While the narrator goes out of his way to avoid bringing harm to Bartleby, Bartleby, simply by refusing to do anything, is bringing harm to the narrator--he's damaging his reputation as well as draining his resources. The point is is that our narrator is above calling the cops. He has the sense that he's responsible for Bartleby. He doesn't just hand his problem over to the authorities whom he knows would handle it much more harshly. We need to compare the lawyer to other characters in story-- that's what Melville gives us. Melville does not give us 20th Century standards to judge him by. What the Reaganite Yuppies would say about how much we need to care for our fellow humans is irrelevant. The elements for judgement are in the text. We must compare the narrator's actions to those of the next person who leases the office and finally calls the cops. That's what just about any normal 19th Century person would do.

When does one stop being tested? Some may argue that one is never stopped being tested--that every day we are being tested. The question then becomes at what point does one give up the futile struggle? Our narrator holds on longer than anyone else in this story. And I would hold that the narrator, by his overtures, by his invitation into his own home, by even attempting to buy Bartleby better food in the prison, the narrator has achieved the Christian ideal. He looks out for his fellow man. He knows he is bound up with everyone. That all are sons of Adam. What more could he have done? This story is a story of contrast between Bartleby and the narrator. The narrator does everything possible to reach out to his fellow humans; and Bartleby does everything possible to cut himself off from his fellow humans. Whereas the narrator embraces life, Bartleby rejects it. It's an unrequited love; the narrator can love Bartleby, but Bartleby cannot love the narrator. The narrator goes out of his way to avoid hurting Bartleby, whereas Bartleby, by his very presence, hurts the narrator. It is not the narrator but rather Bartleby who is the real moral villain of this story. Bartleby cannot embrace the Christian ethic--he cannot even recognize his fellow men, let alone help him. It is not the narrator who fails, but Bartleby, as he rejects life. We can pity Bartleby in that he cannot find anything in life worth living for, nothing worth doing; we can go out of our way in an attempt to help the Bartlebys of this world find a path worth traveling; but we cannot admire a Bartleby who will not even allow others to help him, who would rather die than do anything else. But we can admire a narrator who fails at saving the unsalvageable, because he at least tried.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. "The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia:" Sad Fancyings" in Herman Melville's" Bartleby"." American Literature 76.4 (2004): 777-806.
Melville never explains Bartleby's choices, his functional capabilities, or his consciousness. Bartleby may be autistic, blind, schizophrenic, against capitalism, misanthropicor all of these.

So while Bartleby in some sense chooses his fate freely, like Dawson and Reeve, his options and the consequences of his choices are severely circumscribed and overdetermined by the ideologies that declare him both unfit for the social world and suffering hopelessly as a result.

The narrator soon turns away from this utilitarian model of the new marketplace relations, however, and takes up instead the story's dominant rhetoric of sentimental benevolence laced with Christian sympathy, the traditional cultural discourse of disability. Although Melville may be treating this sentiment ironically, it is nevertheless one of mode9rnity's most overdetermined framings of disability. In one of the narrator's many retrospective sighs during his account of his ordeal, he foreshadows his reliance on sentimental benevolence with an elegiac description of Bartleby as "pitiabl[e]" and "forlorn" (110). Just as resolutely as Bartleby gives up copying, the narrator himself gives up the rhetoric of dispassionate reason and embraces benevolence as his model for framing Bartleby.

Like the intransigently disabled, Bartleby "prefers" not to be fixed, no matter what solutions the narrator presents for the problem of his abnormal state. What makes Bartleby operate narratively as a disabled figure is not what is explicitly "wrong" with himindeed, that question drives the plotbut rather the way that Bartleby's differences from normative expectations constitute a problem that the narrator takes as his mission to solve.