Bartleby, the Scrivener

"I would prefer not to." Five plain words, spoken without anger, and an elderly Wall Street lawyer's whole ordered life quietly comes apart. He has hired Bartleby to copy legal papers, work of pure repetition, and for a few days the new scrivener copies without complaint. Then he is asked to check a copy against its original, and he declines. Not later, not tomorrow: he would prefer not to, and the phrase never turns to anger; it simply will not move. It spreads from that one task to every task, until Bartleby does nothing at all but stand at the window, sunk in one of his dead-wall reveries, and will not be reasoned with, bribed, or removed. Only near the end does the lawyer learn where Bartleby worked before: the Dead Letter Office, sorting mail addressed to men who died before it could reach them, a man who spent his days among messages that could never arrive, and quietly became one himself. Nothing in American fiction is lonelier, or harder to look away from.