Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Quick answer: Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville: full summary with the ending, I would prefer not to, characters, themes of refusal and walls, and the story's craft.
A quiet copyist in a Wall Street law office is asked one day to check his work, and answers with four words that have echoed through literature ever since: I would prefer not to. Melville published Bartleby, the Scrivener in Putnam's Monthly in 1853, subtitled A Story of Wall-Street, and it stands with the strangest and greatest American short fiction, a comedy that curdles, by inches, into tragedy.
Nothing in the plot is dramatic: a man declines tasks, then declines everything. Yet the story has been claimed by every school of readers, as a fable of capitalism, of depression, of passive resistance, of the limits of charity. Students want the summary and what the ending means; writers should come to study the most productive unexplained character in the language.
The story in brief
The narrator, an elderly, comfortable Wall Street lawyer, runs a safe business in bonds and deeds with two eccentric copyists, Turkey and Nippers, whose tempers conveniently alternate morning and afternoon, and an office boy, Ginger Nut. Needing more help, he hires Bartleby, a pale, forlornly neat young man who at first copies enormous quantities, silently, day and night. The first crack appears when the lawyer asks him to help proofread: Bartleby replies, mildly, that he would prefer not to. The refusals accumulate, always in that formula, never angry, never explained, and the lawyer, unnerved by such unresistant resistance, cannot bring himself to force the issue. Bartleby stops copying altogether, and it emerges that he lives in the office, alone on Sundays among the dead walls of Wall Street. Pity and dread wrestle in the lawyer; he offers money, help, even his own home eventually, and every offer meets the same preference.
Unable to evict him and unwilling to have him dragged out, the lawyer finally moves his entire office to another building, abandoning Bartleby like a fixture. The new tenants, less scrupulous, have Bartleby arrested as a vagrant and sent to the Tombs, the city prison. The lawyer visits, arranges with a grub-man for decent food, and pleads with him; Bartleby, who prefers not to dine, turns his face to the wall. On a second visit the lawyer finds him in the prison yard, curled at the base of the wall, dead, his eyes open. The story closes with the one scrap of rumour the narrator can offer in place of a biography: Bartleby had reportedly worked in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, burning undeliverable mail, letters sent to the dead, rings for fingers that had mouldered, banknotes for the starved. The narrator's last words are the famous double sigh: Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
The characters and what they want
Bartleby wants, as far as the story permits us to know, nothing, and the void where his motive should be is the story's deliberate centre. The narrator wants to be a good man cheaply: kind within reason, charitable within convenience, and Melville's true subject is the slow bankruptcy of that qualified goodness against an absolute case. Turkey and Nippers want their small comforts and grievances, and their mechanical eccentricities show us what the office normally digests; Bartleby is the one thing it cannot. Ginger Nut supplies cakes and an apprentice's eye. Wall Street itself, all walls and screens, wants business as usual.
Themes and meaning
Exam readings, all defensible: the dehumanising office, where men are named for their humours and copying replaces creating, makes the story an early masterpiece about white-collar work. Passive resistance, the power of preference against command, has made Bartleby a patron saint of refusal. Charity and its limits form the narrator's arc, testing what one comfortable conscience will actually pay. Isolation is built into the setting, dead walls, dead letters, a man facing brick, and the Dead Letter Office coda offers the story's one proposed explanation, messages of help arriving forever too late.
The sharper observation: notice that the lawyer, not Bartleby, is the protagonist. Bartleby does not change; the lawyer does, from complacency through irritation, dread, tenderness, evasion, to the final sigh that yokes one scrivener to the whole species. The story's genius is to withhold Bartleby's inside completely, so that every reader's explanation, economic, clinical, spiritual, becomes a self-portrait. Melville built a mirror and disguised it as a clerk.
The craft: how the story works
The comic opening is load-bearing. Melville spends pages on Turkey's afternoons and Nippers's mornings, teaching us to read the office as farce, so that Bartleby's first mild refusal lands as another joke, and the reader, like the lawyer, discovers too late that the joke has stopped being one. The formula itself is a lesson in repetition: the words never vary, but each recurrence falls on changed circumstances, so the same sentence grows from oddity to menace to epitaph. Point of view does the rest; first person keeps Bartleby permanently exterior, and prevents the explanation the story must never give.
The technique worth stealing is the fixed phrase against a moving background. Give a character one unchanging response and escalate the situations that meet it; the reader will feel the pressure rise though nothing in the character moves. Writory's Short Story Contest scores Character and Emotional Impact as separate marks, and Bartleby is the standing proof that a character who never changes can still carry both, provided the narrator around him does the changing.
Lines that carry it
I would prefer not to is the most famous sentence of refusal in American literature, and its power is grammatical: prefer converts rebellion into taste, leaving authority nothing to push against. Every escalation in the story is that verb quietly holding its ground. The closing exclamation, Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!, earns its fame the opposite way, by finally abandoning the lawyer's measured legal prose for a cry, and by its order: first the man, then the species, the single case widening into the general grief. Between those two utterances, one refusing, one mourning, the whole story hangs.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, argue that the lawyer is the protagonist; Bartleby is the fixed point the narrator changes around.
- Use the walls, office screens, brick views, the Tombs, as the symbol cluster for isolation.
- Treat the Dead Letter Office coda as a proposed, not a definitive, explanation; examiners reward that caution.
- Writers: study the comic opening that teaches readers the wrong genre, so the turn to tragedy blindsides them honestly.
- Steal the fixed phrase device: one unvarying sentence meeting escalating situations reads as rising pressure.
- Withhold your enigma's interior completely; partial explanations kill this kind of story.
Try it yourself
Write a story narrated by a reasonable, self-satisfied person whose routine is disrupted by someone who politely declines, with one unchanging sentence, to participate in an ordinary obligation. Escalate only the narrator's responses, never the refuser's words, and end with the narrator changed and the refusal unexplained.
Questions
What happens at the end of Bartleby the Scrivener?
Evicted after the lawyer moves offices, Bartleby is jailed as a vagrant in the Tombs, where he prefers not to eat and is found dead in the prison yard, curled facing the wall. A rumour follows that he once worked in the Dead Letter Office, and the narrator closes with the cry: Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
What does I would prefer not to mean?
The phrase turns refusal into mild preference, giving authority nothing to grip. Readers have taken it as passive resistance, as withdrawal from dehumanising work, or as the voice of complete despair. Melville leaves the motive empty on purpose, so every interpretation reveals the interpreter.
What is the significance of the Dead Letter Office?
The closing rumour that Bartleby burned undeliverable mail, help arriving forever too late, is the narrator's one attempt to explain him: a man soaked in futility until he adopted it. The story offers it as a possibility, not an answer, and the sigh that follows mourns everyone.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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