American novelist Herman Melville, of Moby Dick fame, wrote a short story entitled Bartleby, the Scrivener in 1853.

It was first published anonymously in Putnam s Magazine. The central character in the story, Bartleby, is a scrivener a person who could both read and write, and was employed to, among other things, hand-copy legal documents, take dictation, and maintain judicial records. The role later evolved into the modern occupations of clerk, typist, secretary, and notary public (Barnhart, 1995). The narrator, an elderly lawyer who does a comfortable business helping wealthy men deal with mortgages, title deeds, and bonds, relates the story of the strangest man he has ever known. Bartleby is a new addition to the narrator s staff. The narrator already employs two scriveners, Nippers and Turkey. Nippers suffers from indigestion, and Turkey is a drunk, but the office survives because in the mornings Turkey is sober even though Nippers is irritable, and in the afternoon Nippers has calmed down even though Turkey is drunk. Ginger Nut, the office boy, gets his name from the little cakes he brings the men. Bartleby comes in answer to a job ad, and the narrator hires the forlorn looking young man in hopes that his calmness will soothe the temperaments of the other scriveners. One day, when Bartleby is asked to help proofread one of the documents he copied, he answers simply, I would prefer not to. It is the first of many refusals. To the dismay of the narrator and the irritation of the other employees, Bartleby takes part in fewer and fewer duties around the office. The narrator makes several attempts to reason with Bartleby and to learn about him, but Bartleby always responds the same way when asked to do a task or give out information about himself, I would prefer not to. One weekend, when the narrator stops in at the office, he discovers that Bartleby is living there. The loneliness of Bartleby s life strikes the narrator as poignantly sad at night and on Sundays, Wall Street is as desolate as a ghost town. He alternates between pity and revulsion for Bartleby s bizarre behavior. Bartleby continues to refuse duties, until finally he is doing no work at all. And yet the narrator cannot get him to leave. The scrivener has a strange power over his employer, and the narrator feels he cannot do anything to harm this forlorn man. But his business associates begin to wonder at Bartleby s presence at the office, since he does no work, and the threat of a ruined reputation forces the narrator to do something. His attempts to get Bartleby to leave are fruitless, and so the narrator moves his own offices to a new location. Soon afterward, the new tenants of the narrator s old offices come to him asking for help, as Bartleby will not leave. When they oust him from the offices, Bartleby haunts the hallways. The narrator goes to see Bartleby in one last attempt to reason with him, but Bartleby rejects him. For fear of being bothered by the growing anti-Bartleby movement, the narrator stays away from work for a few days. When he returns, he learns that Bartleby has been jailed. At the prison, Bartleby seems even more glum than usual. The narrator s friendliness is rebuffed. The narrator bribes a jailer to make sure Bartleby stays well fed; yet when the narrator returns a few days later, Bartleby has died of starvation. He had preferred not to eat. Sometime afterward, the narrator hears a rumor that Bartleby worked in a Dead Letter Office. The narrator reflects that the dead letters would have made anyone of Bartleby s temperament sink into an even darker gloom. The letters are emblems for our mortality and the failure of our best intentions. Through Bartleby, the narrator has glimpsed the world as the miserable scrivener must have seen it.

The closing words of the story are the narrator s resigned and saddened ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! (Melville, 2004) Bartleby represents a naturally taciturn man who has been driven to increasing depths of depression by life in general, with his work at the Dead Letter Office probably being a chief contributor to his downward spiral. The other employees in the story serve as contrasts to Bartleby s increasing apathy. As his depression and apathy grow, so does his passive-aggressive response to work requests. The narrator, who is Bartleby s employer and manager, feels sympathy and curiosity toward Bartleby, and so takes a very theory Y approach to the issue of Bartleby s nonperformance. Eventually, however, he takes the extremely non-confrontational approach of moving his business away from Bartleby when his efforts at firing Bartleby fail. The new business tenants that take over the office Bartleby haunts have much less of an issue dealing with the problem, and shortly succeed in ridding themselves of Bartleby by getting him thrown in The Tombs, a colloquial name for the Manhattan Detention Complex in New York, a terrible location that became known as a mausoleum for the living (Meyer, 2007). Bartleby appears to be a study of clinical depression and of the consequences (to both the depressed victim and the employer) of his manager s sympathetic but ultimately incorrect responses. The historical setting and unfamiliar language aside, it is an all too common scenario that is no doubt played out to various ends countless times throughout the corporate world. As psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas points out, The narrator s willingness to tolerate Bartleby s work stoppage is what needs to be explained. As the story proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that the lawyer identifies with his clerk. To be sure, it is an ambivalent identification, but that only makes it all the more powerful (Kafka, 2011). This should come as no surprise given Nippers and Turkey s attitude and behavior at work, and the manager s complete tolerance of their unprofessionalism. The manager is clearly a very patient and long suffering employer, but too much so; and as a result, he suffers, his business suffers, and his employees suffer. Had he reacted much more sternly and quickly when Bartleby first began refusing work, then while Bartleby might have gone to the same fate, the other employees would not have suffered and the manager would have saved himself the business disruption and stress of trying to run from the Bartleby problem. Bibliography Barnhart, R. K. (1995). Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology. New York: HarperCollins. Kafka, B. (2011). Pushing Paper. Lapham's Quarterly, 5. Melville, H. (2004). Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (Kindle Edition). Seattle: Amazon Digital Services. Meyer, B. (2007). The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent. New York: Columbia UP.