The progression of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener depends on the nameless narrator’s willingness to keep the titular Bartleby employed despite his escalating incidents of “passive resistance” (1478). The narrator frequently cites his own compassion as the reason he allows Bartleby to continue to work for him, such as when he worries that a different employer might lead to Bartleby being “rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve” (1478), or when he laments that Bartleby’s taken to living in the office and feels for them as they are both “sons of Adam” (1481). These instances are bookended by visits to Trinity Church, lending them a particularly Christian flavor. The narrator goes to the church regularly, and in his faith he finds some degree of humanity to extend time and again to his increasingly strange employee.

When the narrator becomes revolted with Bartleby after deciding that the “scrivener [is] the victim of innate and incurable disorder” (1482), his faith lapses. He outright states that the “things [he] had seen disqualified him from church-going” (1482) as he continues on with the intention of excising the scrivener from his office. The more frustrated he grows, the more disconnected the narrative gets from the repeated inclusion of his Christianity and the tolerance the faith would expect him to practice.