In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk, who after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, responding to any request with the words "I would prefer not to."
Numerous critical essays have been published about the story, which scholar Robert Milder describes as "unquestionably the masterpiece of the short fiction" in the Melville canon.
He hires the forlorn-looking Bartleby in the hope that his calmness will soothe the other two, each of whom displays an irascible temperament during an opposite half of the day.
[3] Critic Andrew Knighton said Melville may have been influenced by an obscure work from 1846, Robert Grant White's Law and Laziness: or, Students at Law of Leisure, which features an idle scrivener,[4] while Christopher Sten suggests that Melville found inspiration in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, particularly "The Transcendentalist", which shows parallels to "Bartleby".
[5] Melville may have written the story as an emotional response to the bad reviews garnered by Pierre, his preceding novel.
[6] Financial difficulties may also have played a part: Moby-Dick and Pierre sold so poorly that Melville was in debt to his publisher Harper and Brothers.
[8] It was included in Melville's The Piazza Tales, published by Dix and Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June.
[10] Bartleby has been interpreted as a "psychological double" for the narrator who criticizes the "sterility, impersonality, and mechanical adjustments of the world which the lawyer inhabits.
Critic John Matteson sees the story (and other Melville works) as explorations of the changing meaning of 19th-century "prudence".
He wants to be humane, as shown by his accommodations of the four staff and especially of Bartleby, but this conflicts with the newer, pragmatic and economically based notion of prudence supported by changing legal theory.
The 1850 case Brown v. Kendall, three years before the story's publication, was important in establishing the "reasonable man" standard in the United States, and emphasized the positive action required to avoid negligence.
His fate, an innocent decline into unemployment, prison, and starvation, dramatizes the effect of the new prudence on the economically inactive members of society.
Albert Camus, in a personal letter to Liselotte Dieckmann published in The French Review in 1998, cites Melville as a key influence.