Suicide in Bartleby and Life in the Iron Mills Life in the Iron Mills and Bartleby center on characters who are alienated workers, seeking means by which they cannot be deprived of their humanity. Hugh Wolfe and Bartleby are both workers who are victims of the capitalist system. As Karl Marx explains, the capitalist system exploits the worker and therefore deprives him of his humanity by alienating him. Both Wolfe and Bartleby become victims of the system, because they are not only alienated and dehumanized. But in their fight against the system they take their own lives. Their suicides are representative of how far alienation reached Bartleby and Wolfe's lives and how far each of them was willing to go to be self-sufficient. Bartleby joins the lawyer's office as a scribe, after working for Dead Letters. Office. As explained by the lawyer, scribes were paid four cents per sheet, and under their employment, scribes were also expected to run errands for the lawyer, as well as assist in proofreading copied documents. The employer did not compensate for these other tasks. Therefore, it was obvious why "Bartleby should never on any account be charged with the most trivial errand of any kind; and that, even if invited to attend to such a matter, it was generally understood that he would "prefer not do it." '- in other words, that he would refuse out of the blue.' (Melville 15). For one thing, Bartleby wasn't paid for commissions, but for what he wrote. Furthermore, this challenge is a means through which he preserved his autonomy. Bartleby was making a decision about what to do and what not to do. Bartleby Employer's Notice... middle of paper... tells us how the society was changing and how members reacted to those changes and the collapse of the society. Worker alienation was occurring and the goal of self-sufficiency was being pushed further and further away from those same people. Humanity has been replaced by competition and greed. Society was not the place where people lived, but it became a ladder to climb. Works Cited Davis, Rebecca Harding. Ed. Cecilia Tichi. Life in the ironworks. Bedford Books, Boston. 1998. Page 39-74Durkheim, Emile. Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. Suicide; A study in sociology. The Free Press, New York. 1987. Pages 297-325 Emerson, Ralph, Waldo. Self-reliance and other essays. Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1993. Page 19-39 Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno. Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1993. Page. 1-34