About the work
"Ich möchte lieber nicht" ("I Would Prefer Not To") is a stage adaptation of Herman Melville's novella "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street", first published anonymously in two instalments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1853 and reprinted in the 1856 collection "The Piazza Tales". It is narrated by an unnamed New York lawyer who hires the copyist Bartleby.
Plot
Bartleby, at first a model scrivener, gradually begins refusing his employer's requests with the same recurring phrase, "I would prefer not to", until he refuses all work and eventually even leaving the office or eating. After being forcibly removed and imprisoned, he dies in the prison yard from self-imposed starvation.
Cultural significance
The novella is regarded as one of Melville's major short prose works and is often read as an early anticipation of existentialist and absurdist literature; its deliberately open, ambiguous narration has prompted extensive philosophical and literary interpretation, including a well-known reading by Gilles Deleuze. Bartleby's refrain has become a fixed idiom in German for passive resistance.