‘Bartleby’ has also been viewed as prefiguring existentialism, with Bartleby offering a neutral ‘no’ to the demand to roll the Sisyphean boulder back up the hill. Indeed, Borges pointed out that Melville’s story anticipates Kafka’s work in ‘the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling’. Indeed, with its emphasis on the symbolic activity of writing and the ways in which bureaucracy can imprison us into a passive and pointless existence, ‘Bartleby’ can be analysed as a forerunner to the works of twentieth-century writers like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.

His determination to resist this demand will lead to selling fewer books in ‘Bartleby’, it will end with the scrivener losing his job and starving himself to death (like many a less successful author before). The capitalist machine wants Melville to continue producing more formulaic works which would sell copies and make his publishers lots of money: the system wants to turn him into nothing more than a ‘scrivener’, of sorts. Herman Melville ‘preferred not to’ continue writing the sea stories which had proved hugely popular early in his career, preferring to branch out into more experimental and challenging fiction (including, most famously, Moby-Dick, published a couple of years before Melville wrote ‘Bartleby’ and greeted by a number of hostile and bewildered reviews). Throughout the story, whenever he was asked to do. Bartleby stands out to the narrator because he pushes back against this urge to conform and comply.īecause a scrivener is a kind of writer, numerous critics have viewed Bartleby as an autobiographical portrait. Answer: Bartleby the Scrivener repeated the statement I would prefer not to many times in the story. The story’s setting on Wall Street, the financial centre of the United States, is no accident: the world of finance, law, and business, Melville appears to be suggesting, stifles and restricts the individual, turning everyone into mindless cogs in the machine of industry.Įven the job which appears in the story’s title, ‘scrivener’, involves not writing original content but merely copying existing documents.

On the other hand, I would prefer not to is a disposition that. Alongside such passivity, we find, in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, the theme of conformity. I would not prefer to do it is what Foucaultian resistance says when it seeks to challenge power in various localized actions.

Bartleby the scrivener i prefer not to