Bartleby the Scrivener
by Herman Melville

"Bartleby the Scrivener" is Herman Melville's curious, confounding, frustrating, enigmatic, absurdist, funny, sad, touching, Existential, individualistic, biblical, spiritual tale of a man who would prefer not to...

When he is thrust upon (or perhaps bestowed upon) his employer, the novella's narrator, Bartleby becomes his responsibility, as well as his providence, and, ultimately, his cross to bear. While torn between banishing Bartleby and caring for him, in the end he cannot deny the younger man his destiny: to waste away and join the souls whose correspondences he accumulated and read and burned when he once worked as a clerk in the Dead Letters Office.

While Melville's story may well be open to a wide range of interpretations, no one can argue that his final words provide a moving epitaph for his title character. "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"