Or, to extend this from the literary to the political realm, when presented with a person's resistance-passive or otherwise-it is the obligation of observers-indeed, of all in a democratic society-to think about the possibilities of what that person might stand for, even if we cannot pinpoint a single issue, meaning, or demand.
For Franklin, the significance of being "continually asked to guess" who Bartleby is, or what he means, is not only the function of the story, but the obligation of its readers. Bruce Franklin once wrote, "we must first realize that we can never know who or what Bartleby is, but that we are continually asked to guess who or what he might be"-this from Franklin's The Wake of Gods: Melville's Mythology (1963). Does Bartleby's "extraordinary quantity" of mechanical writing suggest a reading of the story as representing the increasing industrialization of nineteenth-century America? Do the avoidant actions of the story's narrator-Bartleby's boss-point to the limits of benevolence and charity? Does Bartleby's former employ, the Dead Letter Office, correspond to Melville's own feelings about the trajectory (and content) of his failing literary career? And most inscrutable of all: why, precisely, does Bartleby so often "prefer not to"? What on earth (or above) could be motivating his willful, but undeniably passive resistance?Īs any reader of "Bartleby" knows, these questions cannot be answered with certitude. Melville's account of how the eponymous scrivener, whose job is to produce multiple copies of legal documents, slowly and deliberately withdraws from everyday life with the sole explanation, "I would prefer not to," has continued to resist interpretation. "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," composed in 1853, is perhaps Herman Melville's most famous short story.
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