Bartleby, the Scrivener Summary: Melville's Story of Wall Street
What it is about
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by Herman Melville, first published anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine. It was reprinted, with minor textual alterations, in his collection The Piazza Tales in 1856.
The setup is simple. An elderly, unnamed lawyer runs a small office on Wall Street in New York, dealing in legal documents. He already employs two scriveners (copyists) and an errand boy. Business grows, so he hires a fourth man, Bartleby.
At first Bartleby is an excellent appointment. He produces a large volume of high-quality copying. Then one day the lawyer asks him to help proofread a document, and Bartleby answers with the phrase that will become his only reply to anything: "I would prefer not to."
He is not rude. He does not argue, resign or explain. He simply prefers not to. Over time he performs fewer and fewer tasks, then none at all, and spends long stretches staring out of an office window at a brick wall. The lawyer tries to reason with him and tries to learn something about his history, and fails at both. Calling one Sunday morning, he discovers that Bartleby has been living in the office.
From there the story becomes a slow problem of conscience. Business associates notice a clerk who is always present and never working. The lawyer's reputation is at stake, but he cannot bring himself to throw the man out. What he does instead, and what follows from it, is the heart of the tale.
The narration is set between 1848 (the story takes place after the death of John Jacob Astor) and 1853, the year of publication. The event that sets things in motion is the narrator being given the office of a Master of Chancery, which places the main action before 1847.
The main characters
The narrator is the elderly Wall Street lawyer. He is comfortable, cautious and proud of being a safe man. He is also the one who tells us everything, which means every judgement about Bartleby passes through his self-interest first.
Bartleby is the scrivener. We learn almost nothing about him. He has no backstory in the body of the story, no stated motive and, after a point, almost no vocabulary beyond his one refusal.
Turkey and Nippers are the other two scriveners, aged sixty and twenty-five. Ginger Nut is the twelve-year-old errand boy. The three of them give the office its comedy and its ordinary human friction, and they set the normal working world against which Bartleby's stillness registers.
The themes
Refusal is the obvious one. Bartleby does not rebel, protest or demand. He withdraws. "I would prefer not to" is a polite formula that no office procedure can answer, because it never breaks a rule and never obeys one either.
Then there is the question of what an employer owes an employee. The lawyer's kindness is real, but it is always weighed against embarrassment and reputation. The story keeps asking how far decency extends once it becomes inconvenient.
Work itself is under examination. Copying legal documents is pure repetition, and the subtitle, "A Story of Wall Street", plants the tale in the commercial heart of New York. The brick wall Bartleby stares at is the view the job provides.
Finally there is unknowability. The narrator wants an explanation for Bartleby and never gets one. Neither does the reader, quite.
How it ends (spoilers)
Unable to evict Bartleby, the lawyer moves his business to another building and leaves him behind. The new tenant asks for help; the lawyer says Bartleby is not his responsibility. A week or so later, other tenants and the landlord come to him, because Bartleby now sits on the stairs all day and sleeps in the doorway at night. The lawyer visits, offers him other jobs, even offers to take him into his own home. Bartleby declines, and the lawyer leaves town for a few days to avoid the trouble.
On his return he learns the landlord called the police. Bartleby has been arrested as a vagrant and imprisoned in the Tombs. The lawyer visits, is spurned, and bribes a cook to make sure Bartleby is fed. Returning a few days later, he finds Bartleby dead of starvation, having preferred not to eat.
Months afterwards the narrator hears a rumour that Bartleby once worked in a dead letter office, and reflects on what that work might have done to him. The last line is "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
Why it still matters
Numerous critical essays have been written about the story, and the scholar Robert Milder calls it "unquestionably the masterpiece of the short fiction" in Melville's work. Part of the reason is that it refuses to settle. Bartleby can be read as a worker, a sufferer, a saint or a void, and the text supports several readings without confirming any.
The phrase has outlived the page. "I would prefer not to" is one of the most quoted sentences in American literature, useful to anyone who has ever sat in an office and felt the pull of simply stopping. For readers coming to Melville after Moby-Dick, this is the short, strange, concentrated side of him, and it takes an afternoon rather than a season.
