Bartleby, the Scrivener: Re-scrivened

A case for the Herman Melville character as the hero we need today

In my second year American Literature course, I wrote an ill-received essay on the 1856 short story by Herman Melville called “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.”

My essay was titled “Bartleby’s Unreasonableness as a Mirror to an Unreasonable Society,” and I think I got like a B or something.

The story tells the tale of a Wall Street lawyer who hires a mysterious man named Bartleby to be one of his scriveners, or scribes. Bartleby is hard at work for a few days before he begins to refuse to work. Anytime the narrator asks him to do something, he says “I would prefer not to.” Eventually, he stops working altogether and takes up residence in the office, preferring not to leave. The story ends with Bartleby being arrested because they can’t get him to leave the office, and ultimately dying.

I’m on a one-woman crusade to tell you that Bartleby, the Scrivener, is the hero we need today.

What can I say about Bartleby to convince you? That he’s the original quiet quitter, that he invented work-life balance? (With a bit more emphasis on the life side of things, to be fair.) An early, early predecessor of the “lazy girl job” trend?

I mean, I’d beg us all to try and do what he did. The next time your boss asks you do so something you don’t particularly fancy doing, hit them with the old “I would prefer not to,” and see how it goes for you! And that’s the point: Bartleby’s reply remains as radical, as unreasonable and confusing today as it was then.

As someone who has “I would prefer not to”d once or twice in my extremely short-lived career thus far, I must tell you I can’t in good faith recommend it. We’ve all been asked to do something at work that we’d prefer not to, and we feel ourselves becoming unreasonable with any objections we can come up with.

Bartleby gets right to the absurdity of the boss-employee relationship. Who are you, what is your identity, when you surrender yourself to the employ of another person, no matter how well-meaning, as thinks Bartleby’s boss about himself.

When the narrator asks Bartleby to be reasonable, in an attempt to help him, he says:

“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.

I weirdly identify with Bartleby. Who among us hasn’t been in Bartleby’s shoes? To prefer not to do something, not that we can’t or won’t, but prefer not to. We grasp around for reasons why we don’t want to do that particular thing, and come up empty. Does this really make us unreasonable?

I think I understand Bartleby better now than I did then. I wrote in my essay, years ago now, that Bartleby was being unreasonable on purpose. Now, I’m not sure if I even believe that Bartleby is unreasonable.

You could argue that Bartleby is unreasonable because he refuses to take reasonable action to help himself. For example, he refuses to let the narrator help him find another job. But there’s nothing inherently unreasonable about aggressively pursuing our own agency, no matter how often that clashes with polite society.

What does it mean to outright reject work, maybe through “quiet quitting” or phoning in remote jobs, or simply quitting jobs that don't do us any good. Work is so tied to our identities. I’ve only been unemployed for like a month and it’s all I can think about! Whether I like it or not, my life has had to become my work instead.

I’m reminded of an English professor I had who used to urge us to think of our scholarly studies as work, to sit down and work on, say, parsing a piece of Medieval literature like we might craft an email.

No matter which way you slice it, working for your own sake, working on your own projects, will never be the same as working in a boss-employee relationship, no matter which end you find yourself on.

Why has this one character stuck with me so much for the past five years? Of everything I read over the course of my degree, why does this man take up so much space in my brain? You could even say that Bartleby is living rent-free in my head, just like he does in the law offices of the narrator.

Perhaps I wrongly judged Bartleby all those years ago, and this is me making up for it. Bartleby, I understand you now! You’re not unreasonable, nor am I!

How we treat work is always changing, but even through the changes of the past century, Bartleby still speaks to the individualist and the nonconformist in us all, particularly those of us with a bit of a dissentient streak.

The story ends by telling us that before working as a scrivener for the lawyer, Bartleby worked in the Dead Letter Office, getting rid of letters to deceased recipients. The narrator decides that this proximity to death is what causes Bartleby’s strange condition and hopelessness.

Let’s assume, then, that Bartleby is simply a disaffected man, down on his luck, with no positive outlook on the world. (Other interpretations have described Bartleby’s condition as depression.)

To me, right now, Bartleby asks the question of what should we do when we feel completely despondent? He doesn’t seek fulfillment in work, even though he has every opportunity to. Bartleby choses not to work, and thus, not to live.

If we don’t work, how can we live?

This is what I ask myself. What should we do when our identity doesn’t involve work? What should we do when we prefer to do nothing at all? Unlike Bartleby, I think the answer is to try and live more, not less.

But also — if the story was about me, I probably would’ve just done the stuff.