Every “Prefer” in Bartleby, the Scrivener

Every few months the same four words come back around the internet, usually laid over a photograph of an open-plan office: I would prefer not to. They have become the patron saint of quiet quitting. Count them in the story they come from and the meme gets thinner. The word “prefer” appears 47 times in the 14,358 words of Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby says it 23 of those times, and the exact sentence — “I would prefer not to” — only 13. In the scene at the story’s midpoint, he is not even the one saying it most.

Nothing is preferred for the first quarter of the story. The narrator spends it describing his office, his two copyists and his errand boy, and the first “I would prefer not to” lands 24% of the way in, when Bartleby is asked to help check a copy. His employer cannot process it as speech:

“Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, ‘I would prefer not to.’ I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties.”Bartleby, the Scrivener

The grammar is the whole trick. “I won’t” is a refusal: it can be met, argued with, escalated, punished. Bartleby never refuses. He reports a preference, mildly, in the conditional, and never explains it. The lawyer spends the rest of the story looking for something to push against and finding only a preference. The last “prefer” in the story is at 95%, in the prison yard, when he is offered dinner: “I prefer not to dine to-day.”

The word is catching

Halfway through, the whole office has it. In one stretch of 2.7% of the text — a single scene, from Nippers overhearing Bartleby to Turkey’s proposal of a quart of ale a day — the word is said 15 times, and only 2 of them by Bartleby. Nippers says it 6 times, Turkey 4, and the narrator, who has just caught himself, is frightened of his own vocabulary:

“Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions.”Bartleby, the Scrivener

“‘Oh, prefer? oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself.’”Turkey, a sentence after using it

Those 13 uses by other people are more than half of everyone else’s total in the whole story. After the scene the word goes back to Bartleby and to the narrator’s own narration, where it has quietly settled: “He was more a man of preferences than assumptions.” The one stranger who uses it is the lawyer who takes over the rooms, reporting the problem he inherited: “he says he prefers not to.”

Thirteen times, exactly

The exact sentence, with what Bartleby had just been asked. Read down the right-hand column and the requests shrink from a task to a question to a plea, and the sentence does not change.

Nine of the 13 are the bare sentence. The other four carry an object, and the objects are the story’s arc in miniature: not to be a little reasonable, not to make any change, not to take a clerkship, not to make any change at all. He does not want a better job. He does not want anything, which is what makes him unreachable. Quiet quitting is a negotiating position. Bartleby has left the table.

An office with no family tree

The map of the story has 12 figures and 23 lines between them, the smallest map on this site. Sorted by kind, the lines say what the story is made of:

Not one line on the map is a parent, a child or a sibling. The single family tie in the story is a marriage between the prison’s grub-man and a wife who never appears. Bartleby himself has 7 lines to 7 people, and every one of them is a transaction:

When the narrator asks where he was born, the answer is in the table above. The narrator remembers that he “had declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world.” The map draws that refusal as empty space. The only complete proper name in the story belongs to a dead millionaire the narrator enjoys mentioning, John Jacob Astor, and Melville subtitled the thing A Story of Wall-Street. That is not a setting. It is the argument.

How this was counted

Every occurrence of “prefer,” “prefers,” “preferred” and “preferences” in Melville’s text (Project Gutenberg #11231), placed by its position in the story and credited to the speaker of the sentence it sits in; the narrator’s uses are split between dialogue and narration. The exact sentence is “I would prefer not to,” counted whether or not an object follows. The line kinds are the map’s own, read from the interactive map, where each line carries its passage from the text.