On the surface of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, we find a narrator who doesn’t want to fire Bartleby, an employee with an unwillingness and preference not to work. Many will assume a number of things about Bartleby; he is lazy, unusual, and the narrator feels sorry for him. While we all may assume these things, one might point out that the narrator doesn’t fire Bartleby because his is somehow intrigued by his preference simply to “prefer not to”. The underlying message of this short story is to shed light on how some individuals prefer not to participate in the mainstreams of society. The narrator can’t fire Bartleby because he see a reflection of who he could have been in Bartleby and his refusal to conform to a dehumanizing