Bartleby, the scrivener, a sullen and depressed man who used to be of great help as a energetic, go getter copyist before he turned into a lack-luster lazy hermit, was a man of peculiarly odd behavior. Just as uncanny as his employees, the narrator exhibits unordinary and unreasonable behavior too, in his efforts to become famous among the bright lights of New York. As opposites attract, similar people, as Bartleby and the narrator are, repel. Bartleby ruins the narrators life and has his own come crashing down too. .
"Prefer not to- continue reading if one desires, but that is a personal choice, just as Bartleby chose not to want to do any more work. Bartleby's self-motivation had burned out and in no way could anyone appel to it. It had seemed that his employment at the dead letters office had caused him to view life with a bias. Bartleby probably "prefer not to- because he had seen so repetitively death staring him in the face at the dead letter office that he knew death was coming and in the end nothing really mattered. Not how much work he did. Not how or where he lived. Not how well his co-employees liked him. Even when he was just miserable living with nothing, for nothing, Bartleby is offered help but he retorts, "No; at present I would prefer not to make any change at all."" Nothing true counted in life once death came was Bartleby's theory to his life and he became so preoocupied with this notion that he lived life as just a waiting room where death came to pick him up from. He probably incessantly worried over this, which preoccupied his time so much that he could work. In the end he finally worried himself to death. .
Similar to how "extreme circumstances call for extreme actions-, unusual behavior causes unusual reactions, just like the narrators peculiar behavior in response to the odd predicament he was placed in by the influence of Bartleby. The narrator was also a self-conscience man who favored to ignore or appease problems rather than to resolve them and because of this the Bartleby problem was constantly appeased only to keep festering into something bigger and much worse until finally extreme measures had to be taken.