BARTLEBY: I WOULD PREFER TO DO THIS REVIEW

MELVILLE, Herman. Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. The Piazza Tales,
1856.
José Jackson da Silva Freire

Bartleby is a very successful book by the American writer Herman Melville

(1819-1891), considered to be one of the most important American writers, and one of the
precursors of existentialism, although his fame has been largely posthumous.

Herman Melville is the author of Moby Dick, one of the best-known western
works. In 1853, Melville published the work in question, Bartleby, the Scrivener. Considered
today to be one of the best tales in Melville's oeuvre, Bartleby is equally imbued with that
sentiment which is the writer's trademark: the notion of the importance of those moments in
life when, contrary to conscious guidance, something in our nature as human beings
mysteriously takes over, leading us in ways seemingly contrary to our will, and, equally, the
notion that these are the moments when our moral history is determined. I will devote the next
few paragraphs to the plot of Bartleby.

The story is set in the late 20th century, a period where society is still in the
process of modernization, and the narrator is a former lawyer who runs an office in which a
certain scrivener begins to work. The story of this scrivener is told by the narrator (his boss)
as the story of the strangest man he has ever met.

At the beginning of the plot, the narrator has only two scriveners, Nippers and
Turkey. Nippers is a young adult, and Turkey is a gentleman of about 60 years old. The office
survives because in the morning Turkey is always sober and productive despite Nippers being
irritable, and in the afternoon, Nippers calms down and Turkey is apparently drunk. We also
have the office boy Ginger Nut, a young man named after a type of ginger-flavored cookie he
used to bring to his boss.

At one point, out of office necessity, the narrator announces a vacancy for a
scrivener, and the position is then filled by Bartleby, who appears willing to take the job. The
old man, apparently desperate, hires the young man hoping that his calm will influence the
other scriveners. Initially, Bartleby proves to be efficient and interested, doing an
extraordinary amount of work which, unlike Turkey and Nippers, lasted the whole day.

However, something curious happens: one day, when his boss asks him to review
a document, the young man simply answers: "I would prefer not to". The young man did not
want to perform any kind of trivial task in the office, and the narrator, although surprised by
the attitude of his subordinate, cannot contradict him, until Bartleby begins to perform fewer
and fewer tasks in the office. His boss tries several times to understand him, but without
success; the young man, when asked to do his tasks or give information about himself, always
repeated the intriguing phrase: "I would prefer not to". Bartleby's absurdities grow to the point
where his boss suddenly discovers that he has started living in the office. The seemingly
lonely life Bartleby leads makes the narrator ponder over all the absurdities. He feels
sometimes pity, sometimes anger at the scrivener's bizarre behavior.

At the office, Bartleby continues to deny the jobs they have to do, always
responding with an "I would prefer not to". This continues until it gets to the point where
Bartleby does absolutely nothing. Still, his boss is unable to fire him. The reluctant scrivener
has a strange hold on his boss, and the narrator feels he can do nothing to harm his employee.
The urgency increases when the narrator's business partner wonder about Bartleby's presence
in the office, noticing that the young man does nothing.

Foreseeing that his reputation may be ruined, the narrator is forced to act. His attempts to fire
Bartleby, however, are ineffective. So, the narrator moves the office to a new address,
thinking that he will get rid of Bartleby. Although this works for the narrator, because
Bartleby does not follow them, the new tenants of the narrator's old office ask for his help,
because Bartleby is still in the old office and refuses to leave (or more accurately, he prefers
not to). The narrator goes to Bartleby in a last attempt to get along with him, but Bartleby
rejects him.

The narrator decides to be absent from work for a few days, afraid to get involved in the
tenants' new campaign to avoid Bartleby. When he returns, he sees that Bartleby has been
arrested for refusing to leave the old office. In prison, Bartleby appears even more melancholy
than before. He refuses the narrator's friendship. However, the narrator bribes the policeman
who takes care of Bartleby to ensure that the young man is well fed; after a few days he
returns and finds that Bartleby has died - he "would prefer not to" eat and starved to death.
Some time later, the narrator hears a rumor that undoes the insight into Bartleby's life. The
young man was working at the Dead Letter Office (the place where letters go that can neither
be sent to the recipients nor returned to the senders for various reasons), but he has lost his
job. The narrator realizes that the dead letters would have made anyone with Bartleby's
temperament sink into great melancholy. The letters are emblems of our mortality and the
failure of our good intentions. Through Bartleby, the narrator looked at the world as the
miserable clerks see it. The last words of the story are by the narrator, "Ah Bartleby! Ah
Humanity!".

In my conceptions regarding Melville's proposal brought in this story of absurdist character, I

consider that, in a society where one's existence seems to be given by his/her service, as an
individual, to a power structure (in Bartleby's case: a scrivener in a capitalist society in the
United States in the 20th century), the young scrivener was disheartened by the tragic idea of
mortality that makes become explicit that the meaning of life, in fact, has no meaning.

REFERENCES:

MELVILLE, Herman. Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. The Piazza Tales,
1856. Disponível em: <https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf>. Acesso em: 23
de novembro de 2022.

BIOGRAPHY.COM EDITORS. Herman Melville Biography. Disponível em:

<https://www.biography.com/writer/herman-melville>. Acesso em: 30 de novembro de 2022.
L&PM EDITORES. Vida & Obra: Herman Melville. Disponível em:
<https://www.lpm.com.br/site/default.asp?
TroncoID=805135&SecaoID=0&SubsecaoID=0&Template=../livros/
layout_autor.asp&AutorID=531550>. Acesso em: 04 de dezembro de 2022.

PABLO JAMILK. Bartleby e as decisões da vida - Pablo Jamilk. Youtube, 27 de jul. de 2016.
Disponível em: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO_mbAw-h_8>. Acesso em: 04 de
dezembro de 2022.

Wikipedia, a Enciclopédia Livre. Absurdismo. Disponível em:

<https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdismo#:~:text=O%20absurdismo%20é%20a%20teoria,é
%20totalmente%20inteligível%20pela%20razão>. Acesso em: 04 de dezembro de 2022.