How to pronounce“bartleby”in English

Bartleby, of course, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, you know, who always answered his favorite “I would prefer not to” .

And Bartleby's famous phrase, "I would prefer not to"-- when his boss asks him to work, he just says "I would prefer not to"-- it's

What Bartleby also captures, what makes it so great as a short story, is that, at the time, people really thought office work was unnatural.

This is from "Bartleby, the Scrivener."

And so Bartleby, with its simultaneously assertive and retiring protagonist, I think nicely captures this ambivalence of the early world of the office.

What Bartleby means has been a subject of endless debate.

There was even a film a few years ago called "Bartleby" set in a cubicle office, but it was just the same story.

In "Bartleby, the Scrivener," the few windows in the office look out onto nothing but more walls.

Melville had worked for a few years as a scrivener on Wall Street, the setting of Bartleby, some years before he took to the ship.

Clerks were a kind of worker that seemed, like Bartleby, at once harmless and ominous.

And yet, one of the greatest of short stories is about a clerk, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville.

I call it a Bartleby lesson.