Printables · Herman Melville
Every “Prefer” in Bartleby: Free Printable Chart of the Thirteen Refusals
Melville’s story on two pages: where every “prefer” falls and who says it, the thirteen times Bartleby says the exact sentence and what he had just been asked, and the twenty-three lines of a map with no family on it.
What is inside
- Page 1, the word. A strip of the whole story with a tick for each of the 47 uses of “prefer,” colored by speaker; the count by speaker; and the thirteen exact refusals with what Bartleby had been asked.
- Page 2, the office. The map’s 23 lines by kind, Bartleby’s seven lines and what each one is, and how the counting was done.
Who it is for
Made for high-school and college classes reading Bartleby, for discussion of the story’s famous sentence, and for anyone who has quoted it. The story is about 14,000 words; the handout fits one class period.
Where the numbers come from
Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street, by Herman Melville (1853), public domain, via Project Gutenberg (eBook #11231). Every number on the handout is computed from the Bartleby, the Scrivener character map and the text itself, the same way the data story is, so the handout, the story and the map can never disagree. Select any figure on the interactive map to see the passage behind a line.
Free to print and copy for your own class, book club or desk. Please do not resell it or post the file elsewhere; share this page instead.
Constellate turns any text into an interactive map of its characters, and every claim on the map carries a short quote from the text itself.
More printables → Or map a text of your own and read it the same way.