Bartleby, The Scrivener

In this mysterious, moving story, Herman Melville depicts the quiet rebellion of an ordinary man against the machinery of modern life. The story begins when a new copyist, named Bartleby, is hired by a lawyer with an office on the famous Wall Street in Manhattan, New York. Bartleby does well at first, but soon his "passive resistance" appears, which is evident in the phrase he repeats whenever he is asked to perform a task: "I would rather not," which creates chaos throughout the office. As Bartleby''s silent resistance continues, the lawyer finds himself sympathetic to him, immersed in a deep contemplation of the meaning of sympathy, alienation, and the limits of human connection. Borges described Melville''s masterpiece, Bartleby the Scribe, as demarcating a genre that Franz Kafka would reinvent and explore to a greater extent, which meant fantasies related to behavior and feelings, or as they are called today...psychological stories.