Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

About the book

A Wall Street lawyer hires Bartleby to copy documents and initially finds him an exceptionally diligent employee. When the clerk begins declining tasks without anger or explanation, the office's ordinary methods of persuasion and authority cease to work. Melville gives the account to the employer, whose attempts at fairness reveal both genuine concern and the limits of his preferred arrangements. Comic portraits of the other clerks make Bartleby's stillness more striking. The story asks what an obligation to another person might require when that person's motives remain inaccessible. Its office walls and repetitive work give isolation a concrete setting. Readers must consider not only the mystery of Bartleby, but the narrator's need to turn that mystery into a story he can bear to tell.

• Work and refusal
• Responsibility
• Isolation

Why read it

For a deceptively simple encounter that makes sympathy, explanation, and the limits of an employer's goodwill difficult to separate.

English text