Bartleby, the Scrivener

Bartleby shows classic symptoms of depression, especially his lack of motivation. He is a passive person, although he is the only reliable worker in the office other than the narrator and Ginger Nut. Bartleby is a good worker until he starts to refuse to do his work. Bartleby does not divulge any personal information to the narrator. Bartleby's death suggests the effects of depression—having no motivation to survive, he refrains from eating until he dies.[11]

Bartleby's character can be interpreted as a "psychological double" for the narrator that criticizes the "sterility, impersonality, and mechanical adjustments of the world which the lawyer inhabits."[12] Until the very end of the short story, the work gives the reader no history of Bartleby. This lack of history suggests that Bartleby may have just sprung from the narrator's mind. Also consider the narrator's behavior around Bartleby: screening him off in a corner where he can have his privacy "symbolizes the lawyer's compartmentalization of the unconscious forces which Bartleby represents."[12]

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas insists the story is more about the narrator than the narrated. "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."[13]

The narrator, Bartleby's employer, provides a first-person narration of his experiences working with Bartleby. He portrays himself as a generous man, although there are instances in the text that question his reliability. His kindness may be derived from his curiosity and fascination for Bartleby. Moreover, once Bartleby's work ethic begins to decline, the narrator still allows his employment to continue, perhaps out of a desire to avoid confrontation. He also portrays himself as tolerant towards the other employees, Turkey and Nippers, who are unproductive at different points in the day; however, this simply re-introduces the narrator's non-confrontational nature. Throughout the story, the narrator is torn between his feelings of responsibility for Bartleby and his desire to be rid of the threat that Bartleby poses to the office and to his way of life on Wall Street. Ultimately, the story may be more about the narrator than Bartleby, not only because the narrator attempts to understand Bartleby's behavior, but also because of the rationales he provides for his interactions with and reactions to Bartleby. The narrator's detached attitude, towards life in general, and his compatriots in particular, seems to become increasingly compromised as the story goes on through his emotional and moral entanglement with Bartleby, culminating in the story's pivotal final line "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

Various philosophical influences can be found in "Bartleby, the Scrivener." The story alludes to Jonathan Edwards's "Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will"; and Jay Leyda, in his introduction to The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, comments on the similarities between Bartleby and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity by Joseph Priestley. Both Edwards and Priestley wrote about free will and determinism. Edwards states that free will requires the will to be isolated from the moment of decision. Bartleby's isolation from the world allows him to be completely free. He has the ability to do whatever he pleases. The reference to Priestley and Edwards in connection with determinism may suggest that Bartleby's exceptional exercise of his personal will, even though it leads to his death, spares him from an externally determined fate.[14]

"Bartleby" is also seen as an inquiry into ethics. Critic John Matteson sees the story (and other Melville works) as explorations of the changing meaning of 19th-century "prudence." The story's narrator "struggles to decide whether his ethics will be governed by worldly prudence or Christian agape."[15] He wants to be humane, as shown by his accommodations of the four staff and especially of Bartleby, but this conflicts with the newer, pragmatic and economically based notion of prudence supported by changing legal theory. The 1850 case Brown v. Kendall, three years before the story's publication, was important in establishing the "reasonable man" standard in the United States, and emphasized the positive action required to avoid negligence. Bartleby's passivity has no place in a legal and economic system that increasingly sides with the "reasonable" and economically active individual. His fate, an innocent decline into unemployment, prison and starvation, dramatizes the effect of the new prudence on the economically inactive members of society.

• The story was adapted for the radio anthology series Favorite Story in 1948 under the name "The Strange Mister Bartleby." William Conrad plays the Narrator and Hans Conried plays Bartleby.
• BBC radio adaptation in 1953. Laurence Olivier plays the narrator, in this adaptation of "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street". Produced for the series of radio dramas "Theatre Royal", first broadcast by the BBC in 1953 and in the USA, the only radio series in which Lord Olivier took a major role.
• The York Playhouse produced a one-act opera, Bartleby, composed by William Flanagan and James J. Hinton, Jr., on a libretto by Edward Albee, from January 1, 1961 to February 28, 1961.[22]
• The first filmed adaptation was by the Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation in 1969; adapted, produced & directed by Larry Yust and starring James Westerfield, Patrick Campbell, and Barry Williams of The Brady Bunch fame in a small role.[23] The story has been adapted for film four other times: in 1972, starring Paul Scofield; in France, in 1976, by Maurice Ronet, starring Michel Lonsdale; in 1977, starring Nicholas Kepros, by Israel Horovitz and Michael B Styer for Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, which was an entry in the 1978 Peabody Awards competition for television; and in 2001, as Bartleby, starring Crispin Glover.
• The story has been adapted and reinterpreted by Peter Straub in his 1997 story "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff." It was also used as thematic inspiration for the Stephen King novel Bag of Bones.
• BBC Radio 4 adaptation dramatised by Martyn Wade, directed by Cherry Cookson and broadcast in 2004. Starring Adrian Scarborough as Bartleby, Ian Holm as the Lawyer, David Collings as Turkey, Jonathan Keeble as Nippers.[24]
• The story was adapted for the stage in March 2007 by Alexander Gelman and the Organic Theater Company of Chicago.
• In 2009, French author Daniel Pennac read the story on the stage of La Pépinière-Théâtre in Paris.[25]
• Bartleby, modern film adaptation: dir. Jonathan Parker, starring David Paymer and Crispin Glover, 2001.

• Bartleby: La formula della creazione (1993) of Giorgio Agamben and Bartleby, ou la formule by Gilles Deleuze are two important philosophical essays reconsidering many of Melville's ideas.
• In 2001, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas wrote Bartleby & Co., a book which deals with "the endemic disease of contemporary letters, the negative pulsion or attraction towards nothingness."
• In her 2016 book My Private Property, Mary Ruefle's story "Take Frank" features a high school boy assigned to read Melville's Bartleby. The boy unwittingly mimics Bartleby when he declares he would "prefer not to."
• In his 2017 book Everybody Lies: big data, new data, and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are, Seth Stephens-Davidowits mentions that one-third of horses bred to be racehorses never, in fact, race. They simply "prefer not to," the author explains, as he draws an allusion to Melville's story.

• There is an angel named Bartleby in Kevin Smith's 1999 film, Dogma. He shares some resemblance to Melville's character.
• The 2006 movie Accepted features a character called Bartleby Gaines, played by Justin Long. The characters share similar traits and the movie uses some themes found in the work.
• In 2011, French director Jérémie Carboni made a documentary, Bartleby en coulisses, around Daniel Pennac's reading of Bartleby the Scrivener.[26]
• In "Skorpio", the 6th episode of the first season of the television show Archer, Archer quotes Bartleby, and then makes reference to Melville being "not an easy read."
• In Chapter 12 of the novel Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Arthur Dent decides to move to Bartledan, whose population does not need or want anything. Reading a novel of Bartledanian literature, he is bewildered to find that the protagonist of the novel unexpectedly dies of thirst just before the last chapter. Arthur is also bewildered by other actions of the Bartledans, but "He preferred not to think about it." (page 78). He notes that "nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted anything."
• In the Season 1 episode of Ozark entitled "Kaleidoscope", Marty explains to his wife, Wendy, that when the potential for Del (the cartel) to ask Marty to work for him that he would respond as Bartleby would: "I'll give him my best Bartleby impersonation, and I'll say, 'I prefer not to'."
• A story arc from the sixth season of the American anime-style web series RWBY revolving around a species of monsters called "The Apathy" is partially adapted from the story. A central, unseen character in the arc is named Bartleby as a nod to the title character.

• The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek regularly quotes Bartleby's iconic line, usually in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement.[27]
• The electronic text archive Bartleby.com is named after the character. The website's welcome statement describes its correlation with the short story, "so, Bartleby.com—after the humble character of its namesake scrivener, or copyist—publishes the classics of literature, nonfiction, and reference free of charge."[28]
• The British newspaper magazine The Economist maintains a column focused on the areas of work and management said to be "in the spirit" of Bartleby, the Scrivener.