Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” constructs one of nineteenth-century literature’s most enigmatic figures of passive resistance, transforming a Wall Street law office into a theatre where obedience, charity, property and labour are quietly undone. The narrator, an elderly lawyer committed to prudence, method and professional respectability, first presents his office as an efficiently managed world of copyists, partitions, documents and walls; yet Bartleby’s arrival introduces a form of negation that cannot be assimilated into either discipline or sentiment. His phrase, “I would prefer not to,” is neither open rebellion nor simple refusal: it is a linguistically courteous but structurally devastating suspension of command. As Bartleby ceases first to verify copies, then to run errands, then to copy at all, he exposes the fragility of bureaucratic authority, which depends less on force than on the habitual consent of compliant bodies. The case study lies in the office itself: Bartleby’s screened desk, facing a dead brick wall, becomes the spatial emblem of modern alienation, while his secret habitation of the workplace reveals the collapse of any boundary between employment, poverty and existential abandonment. The lawyer’s pity repeatedly turns into fear because Bartleby cannot be “managed” through wages, dismissal, charity or reason. Melville’s conclusion is therefore devastating: Bartleby’s death in the Tombs, followed by the rumour of his former employment in the Dead Letter Office, converts social failure into metaphysical desolation. His resistance is not triumphant, but it renders visible a world in which human address itself no longer arrives.