There is no larger horror than that which Bartleby represents in the world Melville creates through his first person narrator. Bartleby calls into question all that the narrator is. The peculiar power of the story arises from the effect of the absolute solidity of the lawyer-narrator: his impeccable respectability, the growing pleasure he takes in his comforts and accomplishments. This man who insists on telling us of Bartleby, “the strangest” scrivener he has ever encountered, is a man for whom all things ought to have their place; he attempts to discover where Bartleby belongs and what things belong to Bartleby. The unique effect of the story lies in the reader's recognition that though the narrator feels, no matter how inconclusively, that he has placed him in some way, he has, in fact, not placed him at all.