“Bartleby, the Scrivener” was first published in the November- December 1853 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine. It was collected in The Piazza Tales (1856). It is currently most readily available in Herman Melville: Pierre; Israel Potter; The Piazza Tales; The Confidence-Man; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd (Library of America).

It would not be enough to say that I love Melville's story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” because of its sentences, so I will attempt to explain what about those sentences holds my attention. Why do I find that this story has never failed, upon multiple readings over several decades, to fascinate me? What is there to learn from a story that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking? How do Melville's sentences generate such a complexity of meaning?

Before I continue, I want to reflect generally on the nature of the sentence itself. Disregarding the long-standing argument about the relationship between sentences and ideas (does a sentence record a complete thought, or must we form a sentence in order to understand what we are thinking?), along with the fact that the sentence as we conceive of it today is relatively new (up through medieval traditions, punctuation was used to help a speaker phrase and shape the language when reading aloud; modern punctuation was developed in the Renaissance and sentence structure codified by the mid-seventeenth century), let's consider the plasticity of the sentence. Even as we attend to the rigid demands of grammar, a sentence's shape turns out to be remarkably flexible. Within the closed unit of a sentence, the possibilities are endless, as long as we follow the rules of grammar and arrange the words in such a way that they make sense.

Bartleby, the scrivener, became famous with one short sentence: “I would prefer not to.” There doesn't seem to be much to say about this particular sentence. It uses simple grammatical construction without any punctuation other than the end point of the period. Its longest word is only two syllables. It is a clear, adamant refusal. It seems easy enough to understand.

In contrast to his scrivener, Melville's narrator prefers to get things done. He characterizes himself as an “eminently safe man.” He is a Wall Street lawyer (the subtitle of the story is “A Story of Wall Street”) who prides himself on his “grand point[s]” of “prudence” and “method.”