![]() When it comes to arguing for a determinate meaning, well… I would prefer not to. What, readers have asked since it first appeared, does it mean? Illustration by Bill Bragg Is Bartleby autistic? Is he representative of Dickens, or Melville, or Christ? Is the lawyer genuinely compassionate, or a shallow, materialistic man? Is it about mental illness, sin, or economics? Is the office a mind symbol or an Eden? Should we take Bartleby’s repeated statement as tragic, or as hilarious deadpan? The tale is dense with allusion - to other stories, to Shakespeare, to the Bible, to Melville’s own life and experience and reading. ![]() There is a whole industry of Bartleby scholarship. Bartleby persists like a ghost in the office until finally the lawyer finds a way to free himself of Bartleby - he thinks. Bartleby seems to have extraordinary power over the lawyer, who is unable either to compel him to work or to have him forcibly removed. Stranger still is his employer’s reaction. Instead, he stands staring out the window at the brick wall ten feet away. Gradually he comes to an absolute standstill, refusing not only to proofread, but to deliver letters, to leave the office, or even to copy at all. “I would prefer not to,” he says quietly, melting back into his corner. He writes diligently and neatly from morning to night and has no apparent vices, unlike Turkey and Nippers, the other two scriveners in the office.īut Bartleby’s first passive-aggressive complication is that he refuses to help proofread his work. He hires Bartleby, who at first does a bang-up job as a scrivener. ![]() The narrator is a well-off middle-aged lawyer with several copyists in his employ. I’ve reread it several times now, and it draws me in every time. I loved this puzzling, bleak story about the law copyist, his employer, and the inscrutable sentence that makes up almost Bartleby’s entire vocabulary: “I would prefer not to.” Herman Melville’s enigmatic tale about a law scrivener who comes to an office on Wall Street was part of an American lit class in college. ![]()
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