Bartleby, Third Period

I am a teacher of English at Banneker Middle School, a public institution of some antiquity and no distinction, situated between a dentist’s office and a municipal parking lot in a town that prides itself on its youth sports and regards literature, when it regards it at all, as a sort of decorative supplement to standardized testing. My room, numbered 214, is on the second floor at the end of a hallway where the heating pipes groan in winter and the smell of the cafeteria, especially on tater-tot day, arrives by ten-thirty with such force as to make both concentration and appetite equally miserable. I have taught there for thirteen years. During that time I have cultivated, I flatter myself, a reputation for patience, moderation, and a certain mild humanity toward children. I am not one of those pedagogical martinet figures who believe that order is purchased only by humiliation. Neither am I among the sentimentalists who think every incomplete homework assignment is a cry from the abyss. I occupy, or have long believed myself to occupy, a judicious middle ground.

In this disposition I was confirmed, year after year, by the ordinary machinery of school life, which, if tedious, is at least intelligible. There are always the diligent children who color-code their notes and apologize for receiving a ninety-three; the distracted children who possess a native wit but no pencil; the cheerful saboteurs who can derail twenty minutes of instruction with a single whispered remark; the anxious ones; the defiant ones; the exhausted ones. Each type has its management. A teacher who survives does so by learning which wheels may be greased, which tightened, and which ignored.

In my third-period class that autumn there were, among twenty-six students, several who deserve mention for the sake of contrast. There was Trevor S., a pink-faced, broad-shouldered boy whose energies were always greatest when least required. He talked while others read, hummed while others wrote, and sharpened pencils with a tragic intensity, as if each No. 2 were a spear upon which civilization depended. His work, when it appeared, was rushed, overconfident, and full of misspellings of words that had just been written on the board.

There was Nia R., who rolled her eyes at nearly everything I said, yet submitted assignments of such lucid intelligence that I was often tempted to address the lessons chiefly to her and allow the rest to drift like so much educational flotsam. She possessed the unhelpful gift, common in adolescence, of being correct in substance and intolerable in tone.

There was little Mateo, who always had with him an illicit supply of candy—gummies, sours, mints, things that dyed the tongue improbable colors—and who served the class as a kind of black-market quartermaster, distributing contraband under the desk with a discretion that, had it been directed toward scholarship, might have earned him academic prizes.

These three, with their varieties of excess, indiscipline, and precociousness, made up the more visible life of the room. But there was another boy, one whom I scarcely noticed at first precisely because he lacked the qualities that force themselves upon a teacher’s attention. His name was Benjamin Bartle.

I mention the resemblance reluctantly; yet if I do not name it now, the reader will certainly discover it and suspect me of either coyness or invention. The boy’s surname, indeed, was Bartle. Whether his parents had been, by some rare chance, admirers of Melville, I never learned. He was a thin, pale student with straight brown hair that seemed always in need of cutting but never in dramatic need, and with a face of that peculiar schoolroom blankness which may conceal either great inwardness or complete vacancy. He wore the standard costume of the middle-school boy: hoodie, sneakers, a T-shirt whose slogan no teacher ever has time to parse before it disappears beneath a desk. He was punctual, quiet, odorless, and unremarkable in posture. If called upon, he answered in a low voice. If left alone, he stayed alone.

For the first several weeks of school, Benjamin occasioned me no concern whatever. He did not distinguish himself, but neither did he fail. His quizzes came in on time. His notebook existed. He read when told to read. Once, in response to a short writing prompt on the subject of setting in fiction, he produced a paragraph so unexpectedly precise and clean in its language that I paused over it twice. The assignment had asked students to describe a place that felt different after dark. Most gave me haunted houses, amusement parks, or their cousin’s basement. Benjamin wrote about the school library at dismissal—how the low sun came through the high windows “like old yellow water,” how the shelves “stopped being for books and turned into rows of things waiting,” how the silence after the announcements was “not real silence, just the building keeping its mouth closed.” It was better, frankly, than I expected from a seventh grader, and better than anything Trevor or even Nia had produced that day. I wrote in the margin, Excellent imagery. You have a real voice. He did not appear gratified.

It happened that later that same marking period our curriculum required a short unit on American literature, an absurdly ambitious phrase for a three-week march through excerpts, background notes, vocabulary lists, and one complete short story chosen less for its intrinsic power than for its compatibility with district pacing calendars. I had, however, some freedom in selection, and, being weary of the endlessly recycled material about tell-tale hearts and monkey’s paws, I chose Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in an abridged classroom edition whose footnotes apologized for nearly every sentence. I introduced it with some pleasure. The students, I explained, would encounter a strange and famous story about work, refusal, loneliness, and a man who will not do what is asked of him. This summary, while accurate, drew only the usual middle-school response: a flat sea of faces broken here and there by resistance, confusion, or private dramas involving erasers.

We began the story. I read portions aloud; they read some silently; I translated the more antique phrases into tolerable modern English. Trevor declared after two pages that nothing had happened. Nia replied that this was because he had the attention span of a moth. Mateo wanted to know what a scrivener was and whether one could become one without going to college. Benjamin sat with his copy open, eyes on the page, his expression unchanged.

The culminating assignment for the unit was modest. Students were to write a one-page response analyzing the meaning of Bartleby’s repeated phrase, “I would prefer not to,” and explaining what they believed Melville wanted readers to understand about Bartleby or the narrator. They would have one class period to draft, another to revise, and they could use their notes. In my experience this was the kind of assignment that produced a wide but manageable range of papers, from the perfunctory to the unexpectedly insightful. I had no reason to suppose this one would be otherwise.

On the day we began drafting, I distributed the prompt, reviewed the directions, and set the room to work. Chromebooks opened with the customary mechanical sigh of hinges. Several students immediately raised hands to ask questions already answered on the prompt sheet. Trevor requested the bathroom. Nia commenced typing with punitive force. Around the room heads bent, screens glowed, and the familiar labor of school composition began.

After circulating for some minutes, offering the usual suggestions—use evidence, answer the question, capitalize Melville—I came at last to Benjamin. His Chromebook remained shut. The prompt lay before him untouched. His pencil was aligned with mathematical neatness beside the paper.

“Benjamin,” said I, in that gentle professional tone which implies concern without accusation, “go ahead and get started.”

He looked up at me calmly.

“I would prefer not to,” he said.

I confess I smiled. The answer seemed, at first hearing, too apt not to be taken as a joke, and in a literature classroom one is grateful for any evidence, however mischievous, that the text has penetrated the mind.

“Very good,” I said. “Yes, that’s the line. Now open the Chromebook and begin.”

He looked at me again, not with insolence, nor with humor, nor even with weariness, but with a kind of mild, untroubled finality.

“I would prefer not to.”

I waited. He added nothing.

There are moments in school when the teacher’s authority, though theoretically vast, reveals itself to be made of thread. I could order, threaten, redirect, or document; I could invoke grades, consequences, parent contact, academic supports, administrative escalation. Yet all such instruments depend, at the point of contact, upon some minimum assent to the game itself. A student shouting obscenities has already granted one that assent. He rebels against the structure and thus confirms its existence. But a student who simply declines, quietly and with perfect politeness, presents a more singular difficulty.

“Benjamin,” I said, lowering my voice, “this is not optional.”

He inclined his head slightly, as if acknowledging the information.

“I would prefer not to.”

I moved on, partly because twenty-five other children were present and partly because I assumed I would resolve the matter in a moment or two. I did not resolve it. After giving the class another ten minutes, I returned. Benjamin sat exactly as before, neither disruptive nor ashamed.

“Is there something you don’t understand about the assignment?”

“No.”

“Do you need help getting started?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling sick?”

“No.”

“Then you need to complete the work.”

“I would prefer not to.”

By now Trevor had noticed and was grinning openly. Nia, too, had lifted her eyes from her screen. A contagion of attention was spreading.

“Keep working, everyone,” I said to the room. Then, to Benjamin: “Step into the hallway with me.”

“I would prefer not to.”

A titter broke out from the back corner. I silenced it with a look. My own composure, though outwardly intact, had begun to suffer. There is in the classroom nothing so vexing as a challenge that remains serenely within the bounds of civility. Anger, against anger, is at least symmetrical. But one cannot justly explode at a child who seems to be offering, not defiance, but preference.

I let him sit. I finished the period. When the bell rang, Benjamin packed nothing, for he had unpacked nothing. He rose with the others and left.

I entered a zero in the gradebook, accompanied by the digital comment Refused to complete in-class assignment. Had matters ended there, this account would not exist. Yet I found, the following day, that they had not ended at all.

We were to continue drafting. I began class with a brisk reminder about deadlines and the importance of using textual evidence. When the students settled to work, I went almost immediately to Benjamin, hoping to address the issue before it ripened in public.

“Benjamin,” I said, “today you need to complete the response. Yesterday’s choice has already affected your grade.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Good.”

“I would prefer not to.”

He had not opened the Chromebook.

A prudent man, especially in schools, consults procedure. During my prep I emailed the school counselor, Ms. DeLuca, an intelligent and energetic woman whose desk was always hidden under color-coded folders related to students’ emotional needs. I summarized the matter with what I considered admirable neutrality: Benjamin Bartle has refused to complete a class assignment, repeating the phrase “I would prefer not to.” Not behaviorally escalated, but unusual. Could you check in? She replied within ten minutes: Will call him down.

He did not go.

When the guidance pass arrived during sixth period, I handed it to Benjamin. He read it.

“You need to report to guidance,” I said.

“I would prefer not to.”

At this I felt, for the first time, not irritation but something colder—an apprehension that the boy’s refusal was not attached to the assignment alone, nor to the story, but was extending itself by some inner logic to every request connected with the original refusal. I sent for an administrator.

The assistant principal, Mr. Kline, was a former gym teacher with a shaved head, a Bluetooth earpiece, and a theory of discipline that might be summarized as firm repetition. He entered 214 with the gait of a man accustomed to restoring order by standing in doorways.

“What’s going on, bud?” he asked Benjamin.

Benjamin said nothing.

“Mr. H says you’re refusing to do your work and refusing to go to guidance.”

Benjamin regarded him.

“I would prefer not to.”

“Okay,” said Mr. Kline, smiling the professional smile of one who believes that all adolescent behavior can be decompressed through cheerful confidence. “I hear you. But that’s not really a choice right now. Grab your things.”

“I would prefer not to.”

Mr. Kline’s smile remained, though it had tightened at the edges. “No problem. We’re not doing this back-and-forth. Stand up.”

“I would prefer not to.”

The class was no longer pretending to work. Even Nia watched with open interest. Trevor had the expression of one witnessing a minor miracle.

Mr. Kline tried sternness, then coaxing, then the use of Benjamin’s first and last name. He invoked school expectations, respect, consequences, and “making good choices.” Benjamin, without raising his voice or changing his posture, met each intervention with the same phrase. At length Mr. Kline, perhaps judging correctly that a physical removal over such passivity would create more disorder than it cured, muttered that this would be “handled,” and departed with a promise of follow-up.

This promise produced, over the next week, a quantity of handling unprecedented in my experience. There were emails. There was a parent phone call, though no one reached the mother directly. There was a meeting with Ms. DeLuca, with Mr. Kline, with the student support team. There were speculations: anxiety, oppositionality, giftedness, depression, social withdrawal, home issues, internet challenge, attention-seeking, avoidant coping, and once, from our school psychologist, a delicate remark about “possible profile indicators,” by which I understood her to mean some diagnosis she preferred not to name before collecting data. An RTI form was begun. A behavior log was proposed. Someone asked whether Benjamin had a 504. He did not. Someone else asked whether he had ever been evaluated for special services. He had not. A call home at last reached the mother, who sounded tired and said only that Benjamin had “always been quiet” and that she would “talk to him.”

All this administrative activity might suggest that the school was deeply responsive to the singularity of the boy’s condition. In fact it had the opposite effect. Benjamin’s refusal, entering the system, became at once diffuse and abstract. It generated acronyms, appointments, and electronic records. Yet Benjamin himself remained exactly as before: present, quiet, and unwilling. He refused the essay. Then he refused the revised essay. Then a graphic organizer designed to “chunk the task.” Then the alternate prompt, which asked only that he explain the phrase in three sentences. Then the conference in which I invited him merely to talk.

Meanwhile he did not refuse everything. This distinction is important. In math, I learned, he still completed some work. In science he sat through labs without complaint, though he contributed little. In lunch he ate. In PE he changed, but when asked to participate in volleyball, he had reportedly told the teacher that he would prefer not to. In homeroom he answered attendance. There was no tantrum, no collapse, no dramatic episode. He was simply developing, one preference at a time, a perimeter around himself.

The effect on me was curious and increasingly disquieting. At first I wished only to solve the problem and restore the class to order. Then I found myself wanting, more personally, to understand him. His refusal, because so unornamented, invited interpretation as empty walls invite projection. I began reading his old writing samples. I revisited the paragraph about the library. I asked his other teachers about his habits. Some had scarcely noticed him before now. Others had small observations: he stayed after the bell sometimes, not speaking; he read above grade level; he once sat through an entire fire drill with his hands over his ears; he had no close friends anyone could name.

During classes I caught myself watching him more than the others. He became, to my shame, the moral center of the room’s attention, though he had done nothing to claim it. Trevor and the others, naturally, began occasionally to mimic the phrase. “Trevor, put your phone away.” “I would prefer not to.” This they did with broad grins and theatrical languor, thereby proving that they had understood none of it. A lunchtime detention cured them. But Benjamin himself never performed. He never smirked, never provoked, never sought witness. He simply withheld.

One afternoon, after the final bell, I found him still in his seat.

The room at such an hour can be unexpectedly solemn. Lockers slam distantly; buses moan outside; from down the corridor comes the squeak of custodial wheels. The fluorescent lights, harsher once the children are gone, reveal every scuff on the floor and every curled edge of bulletin-board paper.

“Benjamin,” I said, “school is over.”

He looked at me.

“I know.”

“You need to head home.”

He said nothing.

“You can’t stay here after dismissal.”

He lowered his eyes to the desk.

I stood for some moments, holding a stack of ungraded journals like an idiot. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“No.”

“Then go ahead.”

“I would prefer not to.”

There it was again, but quieter than ever, without resistance. For a second I experienced a ridiculous sensation that the room itself had spoken through him—that the desks, the cinderblock walls, the dusty shelves of novels no one wanted to read had found, in that thin boy, a mouth. It is one of the peculiar degradations of prolonged professional life that the imagination, stifled for months by paperwork and routine, will suddenly seize upon the smallest anomaly with almost superstitious hunger.

I did at last persuade him, not by argument but by waiting him out until he rose of his own accord and drifted into the hallway. Yet the incident unsettled me more than all the others. Why did he linger? Why my room? Why the class on Bartleby? These questions, I admit, attached themselves to me with unreasonable force.

A week later, under pressure from administration, we removed him from my class for several days and placed him in Academic Support, a small windowless room near the library where students completed missing work under supervision. It was, in our institution, the nearest equivalent to being warehoused without calling it punishment. I was told this would reduce the audience effect and allow him a more structured setting.

It did not. Ms. Pollard, who ran Academic Support and had the stoicism of one who has seen every species of educational futility, informed me that Benjamin sat at the computer station assigned to him, looked at the work packets, and declined all tasks with courteous consistency. When asked to move seats, he preferred not to. When offered a break, he preferred not to. Once, at dismissal from the room, he remained seated until the custodian arrived to empty the bins. Ms. Pollard, not a fanciful woman, told me with an odd seriousness, “He’s like somebody who already checked out but forgot to leave.”

This remark troubled me disproportionately.

The quarter advanced. My class, being middle school, moved on by necessity. We read poems. We did vocabulary. Trevor got caught throwing a glue stick. Nia won the school essay contest and pretended not to care. Mateo sold a king-size pack of sour belts in the locker room and received a lunch detention so mild that he considered it a business expense. Yet Benjamin’s presence—or absence, for he was now in and out of support rooms, counseling check-ins, and administrative holding areas—continued to shadow my thinking.

One rainy morning Ms. DeLuca asked me to stop by guidance before school. There she told me, with the subdued tone educators adopt when facts are partial and concern is official, that Benjamin’s home situation was “complicated.” The parents were separated. The mother worked nights. The father, not in the home, was sporadically involved. None of this, in our district, was extraordinary. What was more striking was Benjamin’s own account, given only in fragments: difficulty sleeping, no appetite some days, “too much noise” in places others found normal, and a statement, repeated in several forms, that most things felt pointless once begun. Ms. DeLuca used the phrase depressive presentation. I nodded as though the phrase clarified matters.

“Do you think the Bartleby story triggered something?” I asked.

She gave me the look counselors reserve for teachers who wish literature to matter more directly than it can be proved to matter. “Maybe he saw himself in it,” she said. “Maybe he liked the language and used it. Maybe it’s coincidence. We shouldn’t over-interpret.”

Yet over-interpretation is precisely the occupational disease of English teachers. We are trained to discover significance in recurrence, metaphor in detail, motive in omission. It was impossible for me not to see, in Benjamin’s adoption of that phrase, some appeal or symptom beyond ordinary noncompliance. And yet what if this too was vanity on my part—the narrator’s vanity, the teacher’s vanity—the wish to imagine that the child’s refusal was somehow addressed to me, or to literature, or to the deep structures of meaning, rather than simply issuing from pain too blunt or too shapeless for explanation?

Near the end of November, I encountered Benjamin in the library during my prep. He sat alone at one of the back tables, not reading, not working, merely present. The librarian, who guarded silence as a dragon guards gold, was shelving biographies. Rain tapped the high windows.

I sat opposite him.

He looked at me, not startled.

“Benjamin,” I said, “you don’t have to write the essay anymore.”

He said nothing.

“I’m not here to talk about grades. I just want to understand if there’s something you need.”

After a time he said, “No.”

“Are you angry at me?”

“No.”

“At the school?”

A small pause. “No.”

“Then why all this?”

He considered the tabletop. For the first time I thought he might answer at length. When he spoke, however, it was only this:

“I don’t know how to do things I don’t believe in.”

I confess the sentence struck me with a force out of all proportion to its surface simplicity. It was, I saw at once, both adolescent and terrible. There is in middle school a constant demand that children perform belief they do not possess: in assignments, incentives, school spirit, growth charts, restorative circles, and presentations on grit. Most comply because the world later demands no less of adults. But to be thirteen and already unable—not unwilling merely, but unable—to counterfeit that belief; to have no membrane between inward nullity and outward action—this seemed to me either a defect fatal to social life or a kind of tragic innocence.

“You won’t always believe in everything you have to do,” I said, hearing even as I spoke how thin the wisdom sounded.

He nodded faintly, as if to say he knew this already and found no comfort in it.

“Then why not just do it anyway?” I asked.

He lifted his eyes. There was no accusation in them, only exhaustion.

“I would prefer not to.”

It was impossible to continue.

Not long after Thanksgiving, Benjamin stopped coming to my class altogether. Officially he was on a modified schedule pending evaluation. Unofficially he drifted through the building in a pattern no one fully controlled: guidance, nurse, Academic Support, occasionally the library, once the front office, where he sat in a chair near the attendance desk so long that the secretary eventually called for someone to deal with him. He did not act out. He did not run. He did not sleep. He merely inhabited spaces not meant for inhabitation.

Schools, like offices, can tolerate incompetence longer than inexplicability. A disruptive child, a failing child, even a despairing child can be processed through established channels. But a child who simply declines the premises upon which those channels rest is intolerable not because he threatens order, but because he reveals its spiritual insufficiency. I began to see in our meetings, our referral forms, our calibrated interventions, a kind of benign desperation. We were all, each in our professional dialect, saying: Please participate in the meaning we have prepared for you. Benjamin preferred not to.

By December a decision was made, above my station and partly beyond my understanding, that Benjamin would be temporarily placed in the district’s alternative program while a fuller assessment was pursued. This program occupied several portable classrooms behind the high school and served students whose needs, behaviors, or circumstances had rendered the ordinary building unsuitable. I was told the placement was supportive, not punitive. Such distinctions are dear to institutions.

On his last morning before the transfer, I saw him in the hallway outside 214. Students streamed around him toward homeroom, zipping backpacks, shouting, slamming lockers. He stood against the wall holding nothing.

“Benjamin,” I said.

He turned.

“I heard you won’t be here for a while.”

He said nothing.

“I hope it helps.”

A small pause.

“Thank you,” he said.

There seemed more I ought to say—something humane, memorable, redemptive. Yet all the phrases available to teachers at such moments are either sentimental or administrative. Take care. Good luck. You can always talk to me. Each felt false or insufficient. At last I said only, “Goodbye, Benjamin.”

He inclined his head and walked away.

Winter came. The story unit was long behind us. Midterms arrived with their annual freight of panic. One evening, while entering grades, I found his name still in the electronic roster, marked with codes indicating program changes and pending evaluations. It struck me suddenly that though I had thought so much about the boy, I knew almost nothing of his life beyond the walls of school. No teacher ever truly knows. We know the public excerpt, the edited school-day version. We see children under fluorescent lights, in lines, on deadlines, in weather-worn moods. Their inward lives remain, for the most part, inaccessible. Yet our professions tempt us to imagine access where there is only proximity.

In January I asked Ms. DeLuca whether she had any update. She said he was attending the alternative program inconsistently. He still spoke little. He still refused many tasks. There were discussions of evaluation, supports, possible outside treatment. “He’s not doing well,” she said, with professional restraint.

That phrase—so commonly used, so insufficient—stayed with me.

Months later, near the end of the year, I was cleaning Room 214 for summer. Teachers at such times become archaeologists of triviality. One discovers broken pencils, orphaned worksheets, overdue library notices, folded notes of malice or devotion, and beneath radiators entire civilizations of dust. In the back cabinet where old class folders accumulate, I found Benjamin’s slim file from the first marking period. Inside was the library paragraph, the one about the silence after dismissal. I read it again in the emptied room, with the posters curling from the walls and the windows open to let out the stale heat.

There was, in that paragraph, no cry for help, no hidden code. There was only the accurate registration of a place becoming strange when ordinary use had ceased. Shelves waiting. A building keeping its mouth closed.

I sat down at a student desk—one of those undersized, right-handed contraptions in which no adult can settle without humiliation—and looked over the room I had inhabited for so many years with such confidence in my methods, my fairness, my moderate humanity. I thought of Trevor, of Nia, of Mateo, of the countless manageable dramas of school life. Then I thought of the thin boy who had sat here and preferred not to; who had taken into himself, perhaps, a phrase from literature because it gave form to a condition already present; or perhaps who merely recognized in it the only honest sentence available to him.

I do not know what became of Benjamin Bartle. Teachers seldom do know the endings. Our stories with students terminate not at resolution but at transfer, promotion, graduation, withdrawal—the administrative punctuation marks that stand in for fate. Perhaps he recovered. Perhaps he found language equal to his inward life. Perhaps he learned, as most of us do, the weary art of doing things one does not believe in. Perhaps he did not.

What remains with me is less the boy himself, whom I can no longer claim to understand, than the exposure effected by his refusal. There are children whom schools fail through cruelty, neglect, or indifference. There are also children whom schools fail through kindness, procedure, and earnest intervention, because there exist conditions of the soul for which no rubric, support plan, or restorative conversation has been devised. We teachers, especially those of us who pride ourselves on our sympathy, are apt to believe that patience plus attention will at length unlock the hidden chamber. Sometimes there is no unlocking. Sometimes there is only a closed door and, from the other side, a voice neither angry nor dramatic, merely stating a preference.

I have continued to teach Melville, though not every year. When I do, and when we arrive at that famous line, the students usually laugh at first, as students laugh at any sentence whose surface simplicity conceals a disturbance they have not yet felt. I let them laugh. Then we go on.

And sometimes, in the moment after the laughter fades, Room 214 grows still in a way that is not real stillness, only the building keeping its mouth closed.