Bartleby is a law clerk on Wall Street who one day refuses a demand from his startled boss with the words "I'd prefer not to." Over time he prefers to do less and less confounding the lawyer until at last he is taken to prison where he refuses to eat.
- The Paris Review

There are very few stories that on re-reading after re-reading seem to become impossibly more perfect but Herman Melville's eerie aching story Bartleby the Scrivener is one such. Like a parable without an obvious moral it is defiance raised to the metaphysical.
-The Guardian