Bartleby, the Scrivener

An elderly Wall Street lawyer narrates the story of the strangest scrivener he ever employed. Bartleby arrives at the law office one morning, sedate and respectable, and copies legal documents with mechanical perfection. On the third day, asked to help proofread a deed, he replies, calmly and without explanation, "I would prefer not to." The lawyer, more bewildered than angry, lets it pass. Then Bartleby prefers not to do something else. Then he prefers not to leave. Then the lawyer discovers he has been living in the office. By the end the narrator has moved his entire practice rather than confront the silent young man who has chosen to abdicate, in five identical words, from the entire economy.

Melville published Bartleby in 1853, two years after Moby-Dick had failed commercially and just as his career was sliding toward its long obscurity. The story was, among other things, his quiet riposte to the world that did not want his books. But it is also a portable parable that successive generations have read as differently as they could possibly read anything: as a critique of capitalism, as an early portrait of clinical depression, as a precursor of Kafka's office fiction, as a meditation on the limits of charity, as the founding text of the literature of passive resistance. The phrase "I would prefer not to" has been quoted by philosophers from Deleuze to Žižek and absorbed into the language as the most polite refusal in the history of work.

Bartleby endures because Melville refuses, with the same gentle inflexibility as his protagonist, to tell us what is wrong with the man. We are given the symptoms, the office routines, the lunch order of ginger-nuts, the eventual destination of the Tombs — but never the cause. The story rewards readers who can sit with a question that does not resolve, who appreciate prose that builds its effects through repetition and silence, and who recognize, in the lawyer's bewildered kindness, the precise shape of a humane person trying and failing to meet a suffering one.