Bartleby, the Scrivener

Based on Wikipedia: Bartleby, the Scrivener

"I would prefer not to."

Five words. That's all it takes to derail an entire law office, haunt American literature for over 170 years, and spawn countless philosophical debates about free will, capitalism, and the human condition. Herman Melville packed more existential dread into a single phrase than most writers manage in entire novels.

The story is deceptively simple. A Wall Street lawyer hires a copyist—a scrivener, in the parlance of the 1850s—named Bartleby. At first, this new employee is a machine of productivity. He copies legal documents with remarkable speed and accuracy. Then one day, when asked to proofread something, Bartleby utters his famous refusal. Not "I won't" or "I can't" or even "No." Just that maddeningly passive construction: "I would prefer not to."

And then he never stops saying it.

The Cast of Characters

Before we dive deeper into Bartleby's peculiar form of resistance, let's meet the ensemble. Melville populates this cramped Wall Street office with characters whose names tell you everything you need to know about them.

Turkey is sixty years old and works like a demon—but only until noon. After lunch, his face flushes red as his namesake bird's wattle, and he becomes irritable and clumsy, splattering ink across documents and picking fights. Nippers, at twenty-five, suffers from the opposite malady: he's useless in the mornings, grinding his teeth and adjusting his desk with manic frustration, but settles into competence by afternoon. Between the two of them, the narrator gets roughly one full day's work.

Then there's Ginger Nut, a twelve-year-old errand boy whose primary function is fetching the ginger cakes that give him his nickname. He represents the youngest rung on the ladder of legal drudgery, already being trained for a life of servitude to paperwork.

The narrator himself remains unnamed throughout—a deliberate choice that makes him both everyman and no one. He describes himself as an "eminently safe man," someone who has built his career not on courtroom dramatics but on the quiet, profitable work of managing rich men's documents. He deals in mortgages, title deeds, and bonds. He is, in other words, a professional handler of other people's property.

Into this world of managed mediocrity walks Bartleby.

The Slow Collapse

The narrator places Bartleby behind a folding screen in a corner of the office, facing a window that looks out onto a brick wall just three feet away. This detail matters. From his very first day, Bartleby's view consists entirely of dead brick. No sky. No street life. No horizon. Just wall.

For a while, he copies documents with astonishing diligence, "as if long famishing for something to copy." The narrator is delighted. Then comes the request to help examine a document—a routine task requiring multiple eyes to catch errors—and Bartleby's quiet bomb drops.

"I would prefer not to."

The narrator is so stunned he simply does the work himself. He convinces himself he misheard or misunderstood. But it happens again. And again. Each time, Bartleby doesn't argue, doesn't explain, doesn't negotiate. He simply states his preference not to comply.

The genius of this phrase lies in its politeness. Bartleby isn't refusing. He isn't defying. He's merely expressing a preference. The grammar is almost deferential. And yet it's utterly immovable.

Gradually, Bartleby stops copying altogether. He stops doing anything. He stands at his window, staring at that brick wall, hour after hour. When the narrator discovers that Bartleby has been living in the office—sleeping on his desk, eating ginger nuts alone in the darkness—his reaction isn't anger. It's profound sadness.

"For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me... The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom."

The Impossibility of Eviction

Here's where the story becomes genuinely strange. The narrator has every legal and practical right to fire Bartleby. He owns the business. Bartleby has stopped working entirely. Any reasonable employer would show him the door.

But the narrator can't do it. Something about Bartleby's absolute passivity, his complete lack of hostility or even engagement, makes action feel impossible. How do you forcibly remove someone who isn't resisting? Who isn't doing anything at all?

The narrator tries reasoning. He tries offering money. He tries suggesting other jobs Bartleby might prefer—bartender, bill collector, traveling companion. Bartleby prefers not to consider any of them. Finally, the narrator does something extraordinary: rather than evict Bartleby, he moves his entire business to a different building.

He runs away from his own employee.

But Bartleby stays. The new tenant of the old office, finding this silent man still standing at the window, comes to the narrator for help. The narrator insists he's no longer responsible. Other tenants complain. The landlord threatens. Eventually the police are called, and Bartleby is arrested as a vagrant—a person without home or employment, a legal nonentity.

They take him to the Tombs, New York's infamous prison, known formally as the Halls of Justice. The narrator visits, tries to ensure Bartleby will be fed. But Bartleby, true to form, prefers not to eat. Within days, he's found curled against the prison wall, dead of starvation.

The story ends with a rumor the narrator later hears: that Bartleby had previously worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, the place where undeliverable mail goes to be destroyed. Letters that never reached their destinations. Messages lost in transit. Communication that failed.

"Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!" the narrator cries. It's one of literature's most enigmatic final lines.

What Does It Mean?

Scholars have been arguing about this story since it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century. When Melville published it in 1853, it appeared anonymously in Putnam's Monthly Magazine and attracted little attention. Melville was already falling from favor—his previous novel Pierre had been savaged by critics, and his masterpiece Moby-Dick had sold so poorly that he was in debt to his publisher. "Bartleby" might have been Melville's coded commentary on his own career: an artist who simply stops producing for a world that doesn't want his work.

This autobiographical reading has appeal. Melville, after all, would essentially stop writing fiction after The Confidence-Man in 1857. He spent his final decades working as a customs inspector, collecting taxes on other people's imported goods. Like Bartleby, he withdrew from creative engagement with the world.

But other interpretations abound.

The Depression Reading

A 1978 academic article argued that Bartleby displays classic symptoms of major depression: loss of motivation, social withdrawal, inability to find pleasure in activities, and ultimately the refusal to maintain basic self-care. His death by self-starvation fits the pattern of depression's most severe outcome. The brick wall he stares at becomes a perfect metaphor for the depressed mind's narrowed vision—unable to see beyond immediate, crushing hopelessness.

The Psychological Double

Some scholars see Bartleby as a projection of the narrator's unconscious mind. Notice that the narrator literally screens Bartleby off in a corner, hides him from view, yet cannot stop thinking about him. Bartleby might represent everything the narrator has repressed about his own feelings toward his meaningless work—the part of him that wants to refuse, to stop, to simply not participate in the machinery of Wall Street capitalism.

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas pointed out that the truly fascinating character isn't Bartleby but the narrator. Why does this "eminently safe man" tolerate such outrageous behavior? Why can't he simply act? The answer might be that he secretly identifies with Bartleby's refusal, even as his conscious mind is horrified by it.

The Free Will Paradox

Melville was deeply interested in questions of determinism—the philosophical position that all events, including human choices, are ultimately caused by prior events and thus couldn't have happened differently. The story contains a subtle reference to Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan theologian who wrote extensively about free will. Edwards argued that the will can only be truly free when it's isolated from external influences.

By this logic, Bartleby's extreme withdrawal might be the only path to genuine freedom. He refuses all obligations, all social contracts, all economic relationships. He won't copy, won't run errands, won't even eat when doing so would serve someone else's purpose. In choosing nothing, he becomes impossible to coerce. His death, then, isn't a failure but a final assertion of autonomy—he prefers not to live on anyone's terms but his own.

The Capitalist Critique

The story's subtitle—"A Story of Wall Street"—practically demands a reading about labor and capitalism. Bartleby is a copyist, a human photocopier, valued only for his ability to reproduce other people's words accurately and quickly. He has no creative input. He generates no original work. He is, functionally, a machine.

His refusal might be understood as the first work stoppage, a one-man strike against the alienating conditions of office labor. But unlike a conventional strike, Bartleby makes no demands. He doesn't want higher wages or better conditions. He simply stops participating. This makes his protest both more radical and more useless—he can't win anything because he isn't asking for anything.

The story anticipates by over a century the modern phenomenon sometimes called "quiet quitting"—doing the absolute minimum required while mentally disengaging from work. Bartleby takes this to its logical extreme: zero engagement, zero output, total withdrawal.

The Ethical Dilemma

Critic John Matteson reads the story as an exploration of competing ethical systems. The narrator genuinely wants to be a good person. He accommodates his employees' quirks. He tries to help Bartleby. But his definition of "good" conflicts with the emerging economic logic of his era.

In 1850, just three years before "Bartleby" was published, a landmark legal case called Brown versus Kendall established the "reasonable man" standard in American law. This standard evaluates people not by their intentions but by their actions—specifically, whether a hypothetical reasonable person would have acted similarly. It emphasizes positive action, prudent decision-making, and economic rationality.

Bartleby fails every test of reasonableness. He takes no positive action. He makes no prudent decisions. He has no economic rationality whatsoever. In the emerging legal and economic system, such a person literally has no place. His arrest as a vagrant isn't just a plot point; it's the logical consequence of a society that has no category for those who simply prefer not to participate.

Why Does It Endure?

In 2019, the British Broadcasting Corporation, better known as the BBC, included "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on its list of the 100 most influential novels. This might seem strange for a short story of only about 14,000 words—barely novella length. But Bartleby has seeped into the cultural groundwater in ways that longer, more celebrated works haven't.

The novelist Enrique Vila-Matas wrote an entire book, Bartleby and Company, exploring writers who stopped writing—the literary tradition of refusal. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben saw in Bartleby a figure of "pure potentiality," someone who maintains the power to act precisely by not acting. Gilles Deleuze, another philosopher, devoted an essay to what he called "Bartleby's formula," examining how those five words disrupt all normal linguistic and social expectations.

The website Bartleby.com, one of the internet's oldest repositories of free classic literature, named itself after the scrivener—a copyist whose name now represents free access to copied texts. The Economist magazine runs a column called "Bartleby" about workplace management, focusing on "employees who carry out their bosses' often-bewildering orders, even when they would 'prefer not to.'"

Adaptations have proliferated. There have been at least five film versions, including a 2001 modernization starring Crispin Glover—an actor famous for his own eccentric relationship with Hollywood's expectations. Edward Albee, the playwright behind Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, wrote an opera libretto based on the story. It's been staged in Estonia as "Pigem ei"—literally, "Rather not."

Even the animated television series RWBY drew on Bartleby. Creatures called the Apathy, which drain the will to live from anyone nearby, were directly inspired by the scrivener's passive devastation.

The Dead Letters

Let's return to that rumor about Bartleby's previous employment in the Dead Letter Office. The narrator learns this only after Bartleby's death, and he presents it as a possible explanation for everything that followed.

The Dead Letter Office was real. It was the place where mail that couldn't be delivered—wrong address, deceased recipient, insufficient postage—ended up. Workers there opened letters to search for valuables or information that might help redirect them. Most letters were eventually destroyed, their messages permanently lost.

Imagine spending your days reading other people's failed communications. Love letters that never reached their beloved. Business correspondence that arrived too late. Final messages from the dying that never found the living. Hope turned to paper turned to ash.

"On errands of life," the narrator muses, "these letters speed to death."

Whether or not this backstory is true—and we have no way to know—it offers a poignant possible origin for Bartleby's condition. If you handled enough dead letters, enough failed human connections, enough evidence that communication is ultimately futile, might you too eventually prefer not to?

The Wall

Throughout the story, Bartleby stares at walls. The brick wall outside his office window. The prison walls of the Tombs. Finally, he's found dead curled against a wall in the prison yard.

Walls are barriers. They block vision, movement, connection. They're also structural—they hold things up, define spaces, create insides and outsides. Bartleby's walls might represent the structures of capitalism that confine workers, the psychological barriers of depression, the social divisions that separate people from each other, or the existential limits of human understanding.

Or they might just be walls. Part of the story's power is its refusal to explain itself. Like Bartleby, it prefers not to.

A Quintessential New York Story

In 2025, the novelist Hernan Diaz called "Bartleby" a "quintessential New York book" in The New York Times. He described it as a tale of "an unclassifiable weirdo who is always on the verge of being crushed by an ever-expanding city ruled by profit" and "the compassionate mensch who tries to come to his aid."

That word "mensch" is perfect. The narrator isn't a villain. He's just a decent person trying to operate within a system that has no room for people like Bartleby. His failure to save Bartleby isn't moral weakness—it's systemic inevitability. No amount of individual kindness can overcome structures designed to crush those who don't participate.

New York, Wall Street specifically, was already in the 1850s the engine room of American capitalism. Melville set his story there deliberately. This isn't a tale about a quirky employee in some provincial counting house. It's about refusal at the heart of the machine.

The Unclassifiable

What makes Bartleby so disturbing is that he can't be categorized. He's not lazy—he worked harder than anyone at first. He's not rebellious—he makes no demands and offers no critique. He's not insane—his logic, within its own terms, is perfectly consistent. He's not evil—he harms no one but himself.

He simply prefers not to.

Every system needs classification. Legal systems need categories of crime. Medical systems need diagnoses. Economic systems need productive and unproductive workers. Bartleby refuses all categories. He's not a criminal, not a patient, not a worker, not even a non-worker in any recognizable sense. He's a void where a person should be.

And that void is contagious. Notice how his phrase begins to infect the speech of others in the story. Turkey starts saying things like "I'd prefer," then catches himself. Even the narrator finds the formula creeping into his language. Bartleby's negation spreads like a virus of inaction.

Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!

The story's final exclamation has no clear meaning. Is it a lament for Bartleby specifically? For the human condition generally? For the narrator's own failures? For a world that grinds down those who can't or won't conform?

Perhaps all of these. Perhaps none.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" endures because it asks questions it refuses to answer. What do we owe each other? What happens to those who can't participate in economic life? Is refusal a form of freedom or a form of death? Can passive resistance ever succeed, or does the machine simply roll over those who won't engage with it?

Herman Melville, who would spend his final years in obscurity, collecting customs on a New York pier, might have had his own answers. But like his most famous creation, he preferred not to share them.

The story sits there, like Bartleby at his window, staring at its brick wall, waiting for us to make sense of it. We never quite manage. And somehow that feels exactly right.