Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

A Wall Street lawyer hires a new scrivener named Bartleby, who proves indispensable, until he suddenly isn't. One by one, Bartleby declines every task with the same quiet phrase: "I would prefer not to." He won't copy documents, won't examine papers, won't do anything at all. Yet he causes no trouble, makes no argument. He simply exists in stubborn, impenetrable refusal. The lawyer finds himself trapped: he cannot fire this man who disturbs him more than any rebel, who makes him question his own comfortable complicity in the world's grinding machinery. When Bartleby is eventually cast out, the lawyer visits him in prison and discovers that his strange employee has stopped eating altogether. The final refusal is the most absolute one of all. Written after Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick sank without trace, this strange, sad, blackly comic tale reads like a man staring into the void of his own irrelevance, and finding something unexpectedly sacred there.