![]() A comparative verb is articulated by Bartleby as an absolute. The use of the word, “prefer”, then, appears contradictory and strikes an ambiguous note in the story. ![]() The implicit suggestion that there might be something Bartleby would prefer to do is an illusion. Unspecific in what it refers to, the word alludes to a choice which it denies. How could one fault such a genteel reply? Even when challenged “You will not?” Bartleby counters with a quiet “I prefer not.” Like the semblance of choice in his response, “prefer” is both illusive and allusive. 3 Bartleby’s politeness is browbeatingly powerful, disarming both the reader and the narrator. What we witness in the story is a form of resistance based on the paradox of appearing to yield while yielding not at all. On the other hand, this choice and therefore expression of politeness is an illusion, for Bartleby blatantly refuses to do anything asked of him. On the one hand, Bartleby refuses politely, using the conditional form “would” suggesting that there might be a choice in the matter. The statement juxtaposes a conditional with a negative sense, and this lends the reply its force. In their simplicity and politeness, these five words -“I would prefer not to”- and the use of the verb “prefer” most notably - achieve a paradoxical significance within the narrative. In Bartleby in Manhattan and O (.)ĢThe phrase “prefer not to”, or what Gilles Deleuze has called the “Formula”, 2 recurs throughout the story and its repetition drives Bartleby’s colleagues to combative fury. 4 Apart from Deleuze no critic has bothered to unpack this statement.3 The affirmative and negative nature of Bartleby’s “preferring not to” has been noted by Jaworski: (.).2 Deleuze uses this term in “Bartleby Or, The Formula”, in Essays Critical and Clinical, which was (.).Bartleby’s verbal obstruction becomes physical. Towards the end of the story, he is discovered occupying the office at weekends. On the third day of being installed in a legal office in Wall Street, he is asked by his boss to examine a paper with him, but “without moving from his privacy”, he replies “I would prefer not to”. He is an unostentatious figure, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”, who works “silently, palely, mechanically”, but he exercises enormous power by refusing to comply with simple and undemanding requests. ![]() ![]() He declines to do what is asked of him over and above the basic task of copying documents. And as the narrator is forced to admit, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.” Refusing to kow-tow to the demands of his employer, and working to his own individual rule, Bartleby represents a challenge to capitalist, corporatist ideologies.
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