Abstract
Bartleby's quiet refusals challenge his employer’s authority and suggest a form of resistance, but they also deepen his isolation in an alienated job and the loneliness of urban life. Bartleby appears as a dark counterpoint to contemporary optimistic ideas of self-reliance. Independence cut off from community and purpose can become profound isolation.
Context
Historical
When Herman Melville published Bartleby, the Scrivener in 1853, the U.S. was becoming increasingly urban, commercial, and industrial. The novel is set in Wall Street which was developing into the country’s major financial and business centre.
The historical context shows that Bartleby’s behaviour is not only a personal mystery. It also reflects the anxieties of nineteenth-century American society: the growth of capitalism, impersonal workplaces, urban loneliness and society’s failure to care for people who do not fit its expectations
Businesses increasingly valued profit, competition and productivity and Bartleby’s refusal to work challenged these beliefs which were based on the premise that a person’s worth depends on economic usefulness. Bartleby is also surrounded by people, yet remains emotionally and socially alone in the growing urbanisation of New York.
Employers held power over clerks, who were expected to obey instructions and maintain respectable behaviour. Bartleby’s polite refusal disrupts this employer–employee relationship. He represents a darker version of 19th. century American individualism. It celebrated independence and self-reliance; his extreme independence leads to isolation and withdrawal from society.
Literary
The American literary Renaissance developed mainly between the 1830s and the Civil War (1864-65), while European literature of the same period included British Romanticism, Victorian literature, French Realism, and European Gothic fiction. American writers were influenced by Europe, but they adapted European ideas to the distinctive history of the United States with its questions of freedom, identity, capitalism, slavery, and social conformity.
Contemporary European literature, often concentrated on industrialisation, poverty, class inequality (Dickens, Balzac, Zola), family relationships (the Bröntes, Eliot) and social reform (Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Wollstonecraft). American Renaissance writers also criticised society, but their criticism was frequently expressed through symbolism, mystery, psychological conflict, and ambiguous characters rather than through a fully realistic social panorama.
This difference is clear in Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story resembles European social fiction because it examines work, class, and urban society. However, it is distinctly American in its focus on an isolated individual who refuses to conform. Bartleby is not explained through a traditional European social framework such as family background or class history. Instead, he becomes a mysterious symbol of individual resistance and alienation.
Among other major writers of the time were Emerson, Thoreau, Poe and Whitman. Bartleby reflects the American Renaissance through its focus on individualism, nonconformity, mystery, moral uncertainty, and criticism of social institutions by combining several literary traditions:
It is realist through presenting an ordinary workplace, recognisable employees, legal documents, and the business world of New York. The detailed office setting makes Bartleby’s strange behaviouor seem more disturbing because it occurs in this realistic environment.
The dark office, blank walls, screens, confinement, death, and mysterious protagonist create a sense of psychological unease similar to Poe's Gothic tales. However. unlike European Gothic fiction, the threat is not a supernatural monster but loneliness, bureaucracy, and the modern city.
Like much American Romantic literature, the story focuses on an unusual individual who challenges society. Bartleby can be read symbolically, as a figure of alienation, resistance, spiritual suffering, or the failure of human communication. The story also connects with Melville’s wider interest in characters who resist social systems, as seen in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. However, instead of placing his character at sea, Melville places Bartleby in a modern office. This makes the story an early example of fiction about bureaucracy, alienated labour, and the psychological effects of modern urban life.
Philosophical
The American literary Renaissance was characterised by an optimistic pursuit of individualism, spiritual transcendence, and the inherent goodness of nature by Emerson and Thoreau. Melville, however, used Bartleby to explore the "dark side" of these ideals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson championed "Self-Reliance," urging the individual to trust their own inner voice and resist the pressures of conformity. To Emerson, the individual who stands apart from society does so to find a higher, divine truth. Bartleby is, in a sense, the ultimate "self-reliant" man. He resists conformity more totally than anyone else in the story. However, Melville turns Emerson's optimism into a tragedy. Bartleby’s self-reliance does not lead him to a higher spiritual plane or a new truth; it leads him to a void. His "preference" is not an assertion of a higher will, but a negation of all will. Melville poses the question: What happens when the Emersonian drive for individuality is stripped of hope and purpose?
Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of "Civil Disobedience" advocated for the individual to withdraw their support from an unjust government or society as a moral act. Thoreau’s withdrawal was a strategic, political tool meant to spark change and maintain personal integrity. Bartleby practices a form of withdrawal that is far more radical and nihilistic. Unlike Thoreau, Bartleby does not withdraw to live more simply in the woods or to protest a specific law, he withdraws from the very act of living and interacting. While Thoreau’s resistance is an act of assertion (asserting a higher law), Bartleby’s is an act of evacuation. He does not offer a better way to live, he simply demonstrates the impossibility of living within the existing system.
The mid-19th century was the height of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Utilitarianism, the philosophy that the best action is the one that maximises overall utility or productivity. Wall Street, where the story is set, is the temple of this philosophy. The lawyer is a man who values efficiency, predictability, and the smooth functioning of his business. In the eyes of a Utilitarian, Bartleby is a broken tool because he no longer produces copies. By making Bartleby's refusal a "preference" rather than a malfunction, Melville suggests that the human spirit cannot be fully captured by utilitarian logic. Bartleby is a glitch in the machine of American progress, proving that there is a part of the human experience that is fundamentally unproductive and therefore "absurd" to the capitalist mind.
A core tenet of American Renaissance philosophy was the belief that nature is a mirror of the divine and a source of healing. In Bartleby, nature is absent. The characters are surrounded by walls, screens, and grey buildings. The "wall" is the antithesis of the Emersonian "Over-Soul" or the Thoreauvian forest. By removing nature from the setting, Melville suggests that the American drive for commercial and legal order has created a spiritual wasteland. Bartleby is the inevitable product of an environment where the divine connection to nature has been replaced by the sterile reproduction of legal documents.
If the American Renaissance was about the expansion of the self, the idea that the individual could expand outward to merge with the universe, Bartleby is about the contraction of the self. He is a figure of spiritual exhaustion who represents the limit of individualism. Through Bartleby, Melville warns that the pursuit of total autonomy, when disconnected from community and nature, does not lead to liberation, but to an absolute and silent isolation.
The evolution of Melville's thinking in his writings
Herman Melville’s intellectual trajectory can be traced as a movement from romantic optimism and adventure toward a profound scepticism and an existentialist confrontation with the "silence" of the universe, as a later Camus would describe the human condition.
In his early works, such as Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), Melville focused on the conflict between "civilisation" and the "primitive." His thinking during this time was characterised by a Romantic curiosity and a critique of Western imperialism. He viewed the indigenous peoples of the South Seas as more authentic and morally honest than the structured societies of Europe and America. However, even in these early narratives, there is a tension regarding the reliability of perception and the difficulty of truly knowing another person or culture.
This curiosity evolved into a darker, more systemic investigation of power and morality in Moby-Dick (1851). Here, Melville shifted from observing cultures to questioning the nature of existence itself. His thinking moved toward the conceptualization of the "whiteness of the whale," which represents a terrifying void on which humans project their own meanings. The evolution here is a transition from social critique to despair. He began to grapple with the idea that the universe might be indifferent, or even hostile, to human desire and reason. Ahab’s quest is not just for a whale, but a rebellion against a perceived cosmic injustice or a silent God.
Following the commercial failure and critical dismissal of Moby-Dick and the experimental Pierre (1852), Melville’s writing entered a phase of internalisation and austerity. In works like Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), he explored the theme of passive resistance and the crushing anonymity of modern urban life, moving from the cosmic scale of the ocean to the claustrophobic scale of a Wall Street office. In The Confidence-Man (1857), he further dismantled the very idea of trust and identity, suggesting that human interaction is often a series of masks and frauds.
His later poetry and the short stories of his final decades show a shift toward a stoic acceptance. He moved away from the grand, Ahab-like gestures of defiance and toward a quiet, disciplined endurance of the human condition. Ultimately, Melville’s evolution is a journey from the outward exploration of the physical world to the inward exploration of the soul's isolation. He began by searching for truth in distant lands, then searched for it in the depths of the ocean, and finally found it in the acceptance of the limits of human knowledge.
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Summary
The story, set in a Wall Street law office in the mid-1800’s, begins with the unnamed first person narrator, The Lawyer, stating that he would like to focus his tale on a group of humanity as of yet unwritten about: scriveners, or law-copyists, of whom he’s known many. But, rather than focus on a group of them, he will tell the tale of the oddest one he’s known: Bartleby.
After explaining that his office is occupied by himself, two other scrivener employees (Turkey, who is a drunk and therefore only useful before he starts drinking at lunch, and Nippers, who has some kind of habit that means he is only productive during the afternoon hours), and Ginger Nut, a twelve-year-old office boy, The Lawyer says that he has posted an ad to hire a new employee. Bartleby comes for an interview, and The Lawyer hires him.
While at first Bartleby proves an excellent employee, producing a huge quality of writing for his employer, his working habits are rigid and peculiar. When his boss asks him to examine a paper with him for errors, Bartleby replies that he “would prefer not to.” At first The Lawyer thinks he has misheard his employee, but when he repeats himself and Bartleby again prefers not to help, a pattern emerges that The Lawyer must reckon with. He considers firing Bartleby, but decides to try to reason with him, telling him that it’s common courtesy in this industry to go over copy for errors as a group. Bartleby listens, but again repeats that he’d “prefer not to” help. After considering firing Bartleby once more, The Lawyer decides not to, as he becomes busy with other matters and decides that Bartleby is useful for what he does provide, vast quantities of writing. And, in fact, The Lawyer justifies that keeping Bartleby on costs him little to nothing, but it makes him feel charitable and eases his Christian conscious.
One Sunday morning, The Lawyer is on his way to Church and decides to stop by the office. There, he finds the office door locked, and when the door is opened he finds Bartleby on the other side. Bartleby tells him that he needs a few moments alone inside, and after The Lawyer walks around the block and returns to the office, he finds himself alone. With Bartleby gone, The Lawyer snoops inside Bartleby’s desk, finds a few belongings, and determines that Bartleby must be living in the office at night and on weekends. At first The Lawyer thinks of Bartleby’s poverty and solitude, feeling a great pity for him, but soon that pity changes into anger and repulsion, as The Lawyer believes Bartleby to have some incurable mental illness. He resolves to find out more about Bartleby’s personal life, find one of Bartleby’s relatives to take care of him, and fire Bartleby with generous severance pay as soon as possible.
The next day, The Lawyer calls Bartleby into his office. He asks Bartleby many questions about his family his personal history, but Bartleby prefers not to answer any of them. When he asks Bartleby to be a little reasonable, Bartleby says he would prefer not to do that either.
A day later, Bartleby ceases doing any work at all. He spends his days staring at the wall, and The Lawyer decides it is time to rid the office of Bartleby. At the end of the week he gives Bartleby a 20-dollar bonus (a generous amount at the time), wishes him well, and tells him to leave the key when he departs. The Lawyer is happy with how he’s handled the firing, but to his dismay Bartleby is still in the office when The Lawyer returns on Monday, and his 20-dollar bonus is sitting on his desk untouched. When The Lawyer confronts Bartleby that morning about why he has stayed, Bartleby simply says that he would prefer not to leave. The Lawyer knows he only has two options: call the police and have Bartleby removed, or simply keep him on as an employee. In what he thinks is a charitable gesture, The Lawyer decides to do the latter, and keeps Bartleby in his office as a valueless employee.
That is, until other lawyers begin to discuss Bartleby’s peculiar presence in The Lawyer’s office. When The Lawyer believes these rumours might hurt his business, he decides to change offices and leave Bartleby behind for the next tenants or the landlord to deal with. However, the landlord soon tracks The Lawyer down and tells him that if The Lawyer doesn’t intervene, the police will be called and Bartleby will be forcibly taken away.
The Lawyer returns to his former office, talks to Bartleby, but despite many charitable offers, including a new job and even to come stay at The Lawyer’s home, Bartleby refuses all and The Lawyer leaves in a huff.
Some time later, The Lawyer learns that Bartleby has been taken to prison. Out of pity, The Lawyer visits him, and pays another inmate to provide Bartleby with good-quality food. Alas, Bartleby prefers not to accept this gesture, refusing to eat and instead choosing to lie on the floor of the prison, wasting away.
The Lawyer cuts off his narration of Bartleby’s tale at this point, saying that the reader can imagine how it ends for Bartleby. Instead, The Lawyer ends the story by relaying a piece of information he’s heard by rumour: that before working in the scrivener’s office, Bartleby worked for a number of years at the Dead Letter Office, burning lost letters.
Themes
Food metaphor
Bartleby’s loss of appetite and his increasingly pallid and deathly demeanour offer valuable clues to our understanding of his character. Bartleby does not like change. “I would prefer not to make any change” he says, and a little later states “I like to be stationary”. In fact, he prefers not to go very far at all, working, eating, sleeping all in the same place. He is unable to move out of his private world and make public aspects of himself. He copies documents, but refuses to compare them for that would mean working with someone, and his aim is to remain autonomous and self-contained. This neurotic behaviour is underlined by Bartleby’s anorexic characteristics.
When Barteleby first arrives at the office he appears to be breaking some kind of fast: At first, he did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on documents. There was no pause for digestion. He nourishes himself on paperwork to such an extent that he becomes identified with the document copies, and we might consider the ambiguity in the statement, “I like to be stationary”. Bartleby is and is not what he eats. He feeds on documents and is “stationery”, but in general he eats very little.
It is not surprising that the narrator observes “he never went out to dinner”. Bartleby survives on handfuls of gingernuts which are then consumed alone. The spicy biscuits have no effect on Bartleby’s mild nature and passivity. The contrast between Bartleby’s self-denial and the epicureanism of the other characters, whose behaviour is influenced by what they eat and drink, is made explicit. The word play (stationary/stationery), verbal repetition (gingernut/Ginger Nut) and references to food which cannot be eaten (Turkey), create a kind of linguistic indigestion at this point in the story, which worsens as Bartleby repeats his refusal, “I would prefer not to”. The phrase is, we might say, regurgitated in the text, and this calls to mind the impossibility of digestion and satiation for Bartleby. He refuses, in effect, to be fed, except insofar as he feeds (on) himself.
Locked away in prison, Bartleby refuses to eat: 'I prefer not to dine today,' said Bartleby, turning away. 'It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners'. So saying, he slowly moved to the other side of the enclosure and took up a position fronting the dead-wall. He politely refuses to eat, and simply so to live. Curled up, foetus-fashion, he becomes identified with the object against which his head rests -the prison wall.
Free will and personal autonomy
Bartleby’s repeated statement, “I would prefer not to,” challenges the authority of his employer. He does not openly rebel or argue, instead, he quietly refuses. His language preserves the appearance of choice while undermining the expectations of the workplace. This raises a philosophical question: Is freedom simply the ability to choose, or does it also require the ability to reject the roles society assigns us?
Existential alienation
Bartleby appears increasingly disconnected from work, other people, and eventually life itself. His isolation reflects the existential idea that individuals may find themselves trapped in a world that seems meaningless or indifferent.
The law office represents a mechanical society in which people are valued mainly for their productivity. Bartleby’s withdrawal exposes the emptiness beneath that system. His refusal may be understood as an attempt to escape a life he can no longer accept, as well as a criticism of contemporary social norms.
The office’s primary activity is copying legal documents, repetitive labour that produces no original thought. The scriveners mechanically reproduce words, suggesting that modern work can separate people from creativity, purpose, and individuality.
Bartleby’s resistance forces the lawyer and the reader to ask whether work has any inherent meaning or whether its value is imposed by economic and social conventions. His eventual refusal to work reveals the fragility of a society organised around productivity.
The story highlights the profound loneliness of the urban, industrial experience. Bartleby is physically and emotionally isolated, separated from his coworkers by a screen and from society by his internal state. His alienation is mirrored by the setting of Wall Street, a place defined by commerce, rigid boundaries, and transactional relationships. Even the narrator, while feeling a sense of pity for Bartleby, remains distanced from him, attempting to understand Bartleby through the lens of logic and charity rather than true human connection
Passive resistance
The central theme is the nature of resistance, specifically the shift from active rebellion to passive refusal. Bartleby does not fight his employer or argue his position; instead, he employs a strategy of non-compliance through his recurring phrase, "I would prefer not to." This preference is not a refusal based on inability or a direct "no," but a quiet withdrawal from the expectations of his environment. By refusing to participate in the mechanical requirements of his job, Bartleby asserts a form of autonomy that is paradoxically expressed through inaction.
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