Literary Analysis Essay Example (With Breakdown)

Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener is usually read as a story about a man who refuses to work, and the phrase he refuses with — "I would prefer not to" — is usually quoted as the concentrated expression of that refusal. But read closely, the phrase is not really a refusal. It is something stranger: a grammatical construction that makes it impossible for the narrator to respond within the normal terms of authority. The story's political force comes from what the phrase does to the boss, not from what Bartleby wants. A direct refusal would have been "I will not." A request would have been "Please don't make me." A polite excuse would have been "I am unable." All three of these are sentences the narrator — a genteel Wall Street lawyer — has tools to handle. He could discipline the first, negotiate the second, and accept the third. "I would prefer not to" resists all three framings at once. It is not a refusal, because preference is not a refusal; it is not a request, because it asks for nothing; and it is not an excuse, because it invokes no incapacity. The grammatical structure — conditional mood, negative complement, a verb ("prefer") that normally describes aesthetic choices rather than moral stances — makes the phrase unanswerable. Melville understood this. When the narrator tries to respond to Bartleby, his language keeps collapsing. He asks, "Will you not?" and Bartleby says, "I would prefer not to." He says, "You must," and Bartleby says, "I would prefer not to." Every time the narrator reaches for an imperative, Bartleby meets it with a subjunctive, and the imperative fails. The narrator finally reports, in frustration, that he "could not resist" Bartleby's "wonderful mildness." The mildness is the point. The phrase never confronts authority; it simply does not enter the field where authority can operate. This is why readings that focus on Bartleby as a passive resister miss what the story is actually doing. Passive resistance still accepts the authority it resists — it just refuses to comply. Bartleby is doing something more radical: he is exiting the grammar of authority entirely. The narrator is left with a subordinate he cannot command and cannot fire, because every attempt to command or fire him runs into a wall of preference that has no handle. The horror of the story is not that Bartleby says no. It is that he makes no impossible. Melville wrote the story in 1853, in the early years of the corporate-hierarchical American workplace. Read in that context, Bartleby's phrase is a thought experiment: what happens if a worker finds a way to speak that does not acknowledge the terms of the employer's authority? The story's answer is that the employer is helpless, and the story's darker answer is that the worker is also unreachable — and eventually dies of it. Melville's critique of the Wall Street workplace is not that the workers are crushed by authority. It is that the language of authority and the language of refusal are locked in a grammar that leaves no room for anything in between.