Just as the best part of The Trainee is the stunned Deloitte workers, my favorite parts of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are the lawyer’s reactions, which so quickly progress from disbelief to despair. Not just that, but each subsequent refusal produces more and more extreme variations of the same phenomenon: the lawyer, who is often in a rush going about his business, is stopped dead in his tracks, grasping for sense and meaning like Wile E. Coyote having run off a cliff.
