Bartleby, the Scrivener

On a busy stretch of Wall Street, an elderly, comfortable lawyer hires a new copyist named Bartleby to help with the tedious work of transcribing legal documents. At first Bartleby is astonishingly productive. Then, asked one day to help examine a document, he answers with five words that will unravel the office: "I would prefer not to."

Politely, immovably, Bartleby begins to prefer not to do more and more—first his tasks, then eating, then leaving at all—until he has become a silent, passive fixture the baffled narrator can neither compel nor abandon. As the lawyer cycles through irritation, guilt, pity, and despair, Bartleby's quiet refusal exposes the limits of charity, authority, and understanding.

One of Herman Melville's most celebrated shorter works, Bartleby, the Scrivener is a haunting, enigmatic story of alienation and passive resistance in the modern world—a small parable that has resisted easy explanation for more than a century and a half.