Bartleby & Benito Cereno (Annotated)

Herman Melville's "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" are among the most enigmatic achievements of nineteenth-century American short fiction. The first turns a Wall Street law office into a theater of passive resistance, where Bartleby's repeated formula, "I would prefer not to," unsettles assumptions about labor, charity, and selfhood. The second, a taut maritime narrative, uses delayed revelation and...