Bartleby, the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener Review

Herman Melville published “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853, two years after Moby-Dick had failed commercially and his reputation was beginning its long decline. The contrast between the two works is absolute: where the whale novel is vast, encyclopaedic, philosophically oceanic, “Bartleby” is compressed, precise, and domestic — the scale of Wall Street against the scale of the Pacific, a copyist against a captain of the Pequod. The compression is not a retreat but an intensification. In thirty pages, Melville anticipates Kafka, Beckett, and the literature of passive resistance, and produces what may be the most analysed story in American literature.

The narrator is a lawyer on Wall Street, comfortable, practical, and genuinely well-intentioned in the limited way of comfortable, practical, well-intentioned men. He employs scriveners — copyists — and hires a new one named Bartleby, who at first works with quiet, industrious dedication. Then, one day, when asked to help examine a copied document, Bartleby replies: “I would prefer not to.” Not “I won’t.” Not “I refuse.” “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer, temporarily nonplussed, lets it pass. Bartleby continues to prefer not: to examine copies, to run errands, eventually to copy at all, eventually to leave the office when the lawyer vacates the premises, eventually to eat. The preference extends across every domain of life until it includes life itself.

The lawyer’s response is the story’s real subject. He is neither a villain nor a hero. He feels genuine distress at Bartleby’s condition. He tries to help, within limits. He offers money, alternative employment, lodging in his own home. All the while, his primary concern is his professional reputation — the eccentric scrivener in the corner is an embarrassment, a professional liability, something that must be managed. He eventually moves offices to escape Bartleby, which does not work. The building’s new tenants have Bartleby removed to the Tombs prison, where he dies, having preferred not to eat. The lawyer learns afterward that Bartleby had previously worked in the Dead Letters office, sorting undeliverable mail — letters written to the living, never to arrive, bearing errands of life dispatched to death. The lawyer treats this as explanation. The story suggests it is not.

What “Bartleby” inaugurates is the literature of bureaucratic absurdity and passive resistance: the system is exposed not by confronting it but by refusing it, politely, indefinitely. Bartleby is not angry. He does not argue. He simply prefers not to participate in the smooth operation of the world that employs him, and this preference, extended without explanation or rage, is more subversive than any protest. The story was published the same year as Bleak House, Dickens’s great novel of legal obstruction, and it belongs to the same tradition — the critique of systems through the figure of the individual caught within them — but concentrates everything Dickens needed a thousand pages to say into thirty.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The most economical philosophical story in American literature, and the one that has proved most durable: Bartleby’s preference is still being enacted, in every office and institution, every day.

The Office and Its Inmates

Before Bartleby arrives, Melville fills the law office with three comic-grotesque figures whose nicknames — Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut — establish the story’s particular tonal blend of humour and unease. Turkey is productive in the morning and erratic after lunch; Nippers is the reverse, irritable until midday and steady after. The lawyer accommodates both, organising the office around their humours with the same mild, managerial tolerance he will later extend, and then withdraw, from Bartleby. This comic establishment of routine matters because Bartleby’s preference detonates inside a world otherwise governed by smooth, reasonable adjustment. The other copyists can be managed because their resistance is legible — appetite, mood, the ordinary frictions of labour. Bartleby’s cannot, because it refuses to give a reason at all.

Why the Story Will Not Resolve

Generations of critics have tried to decode Bartleby — as a figure of clinical depression, as a Christ-like sufferer, as a critique of capitalist alienation, as Melville’s own despair at his failing literary career rendered in allegory. Each reading illuminates something and none exhausts the story, and this inexhaustibility is the point. The Dead Letters coda is the text’s own model of interpretation: the lawyer reaches for a biographical fact that might explain everything, and Melville lets him reach, and then quietly withholds the satisfaction of explanation. “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” the lawyer cries at the close — a lament that gestures at universal meaning precisely because the particular case has defeated understanding. The story endures because it stages, in thirty pages, the failure of one decent man to comprehend or relieve another’s suffering, and because it knows that this failure is not exceptional but ordinary, the daily condition of the institutions in which most people spend their lives.

A Story Ahead of Its Century

What is most remarkable about “Bartleby” is how completely it anticipates literary developments that would not arrive for decades. The motiveless, unexplained refusal; the bureaucratic setting that swallows the individual; the protagonist who is less a character than a void around which others organise their anxiety — these are the materials of Kafka, of Beckett, of the twentieth-century literature of absurdity and alienation, set down by an American writer in 1853. Melville could not have known he was inventing a genre, and the story sank, like most of his later work, into neglect during his lifetime. Its rediscovery in the twentieth century, alongside the broader Melville revival, recognised in Bartleby a figure who had become legible only after history caught up with him: the worker who withdraws his participation without protest, the self that prefers not to, the unanswerable politeness of total refusal. It remains the most concentrated and the most modern thing Melville wrote.

Final Verdict