Satan still wants there to be a universal monarchy, it’s just he wants to be its monarch.īartleby is different. Most of literature’s glorious proponents of defiance – I am thinking of Melville’s own Captain Ahab, but also Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or Steerpike in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy – are defying the person in power, not the structure of power. They eventually have Bartleby put in prison, where the narrator pays for him to have better meals, but he again prefers not to, and eventually dies of, what? Starvation? Melancholy? Because he did not prefer living? The overlooked subtitle is “A Story of Wall Street” Bartleby is a strange premonition of the Occupy Movement.Įventually, in frustration, the lawyer relocates his offices, but the new leaseholders become concerned about the man who sits all day on the banister. Bartleby is always there when work starts and stays after they leave on an unplanned visit on a Sunday, the narrator finds Bartleby there, and wonders if he is actually living in the offices.

It is never said aggressively or impertinently. It is never “no”, never “will not”, never even an outright refusal. He tries to garner the slightest biographical scraps: “Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?” To which the answer is, of course: “I would prefer not to.” The narrator, who prides himself on knowing about Astor on prudence, Edwards on will and Priestley on necessity, cajoles, offers alternative employment, even a room in his own house. He says – and it is almost the only thing he ever says in the story: “I would prefer not to.” He instead prefers, if anything, to look at the blank brick wall that is the entire view from his window.įrustrated, Turkey and Nippers threaten to blacken his eye. He works “silently, palely, mechanically”, and on the third day of his employment is asked to proofread a document. Business is doing so well that the narrator takes on Bartleby, described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”.

Bartleby the scrivener meaning