bartleby the scrivener by herman melville

This is a film of Bartleby’s trailer. It has no dialogue,and the background music is very prominent is that the sound of typing on the keyboard. The word “I would prefer not” appears on the wall in the video(0:25), which is the most frequently spoken words of the protagonist of this story. 

“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“Will you tell me any thing about yourself?”

“I would prefer not to.”

Although it is a very simple sentence, it takes a lot of courage to say such a sentence. In fact, when I finished reading this book for the first time, I think Bartleby is a quirky and unique man and some of his refusals are very unreasonable. Of course, I admire his courage to refuse. Back to the in real life, I think each of us may be a Bartleby. Human beings are forced to learn rules“obey“ from birth. When we are children, we obeyed our parents at home. When we are teenager, we obeyed our teachers at school. When we are adults, we obey the boss in the workplace. Our family, our school, our society has taught us this rule. So can we say No?Can we just not follow this rule？Of course you can say no, but any rejection is a price. Mommy said that you can’t eat too much candy, you like candy, so you refuse to listen to Mommy’s words, secretly eat a lot, and finally you have a decayed tooth. The teacher says that homework accounts for 20% of the total grade. You don’t like homework, so you refuse to do your homework, and finally your grade is from A to B. You don’t like your job because the boss didn’t raise your salary, then you resigned, and finally you found that your salary was the highest in the industry. My example is not to prove that we have to obey the rules but we have to think about what the consequences are when we choose to refuse. Just as Bartleby choose to refuse and then he died. I suddenly remembered someone told me“If you don’t like one thing, you change it. If you can’t change, you have to accept it.”