I won’t lie, I read this because of a joke in Archer. Having read it, the joke is brilliant. I love little discoveries like that.
Bartleby the Scrivener is a short story about a scrivener (copier of longhand legal documents) who one day upsets the entire order of his workplace when he is asked to do part of his job and responds “I’d prefer not to.” This escalates, with Bartleby preferring not to do more and more, until he is slowly driven out of his entire life, to disastrous consequences. It’s a difficult book to wrap your head around honestly. Much is dead serious but plays like a joke if approached credulously. Bartleby is a strange character, the narrator who can’t bring himself to get his employee to do his job is effete and ineffective to the point of Frasier, and the ending is strange.
Much as with Moby Dick, I’m surprised to find how much I liked this story. It’s well-told enough that you care about these frankly unbelievable characters. It’s been the subject of endless speculation and interpretation over the years, but frankly I don’t have any more patience for that than I did for the exhausting dialogues around Moby Dick. It’s a half-decent story and that was a nice surprise for something of this age and style. Glad it was a short-story though.
