Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" also uses a heightened situation to illustrate a greater human truth. In realistic terms, Bartleby's refusal to work is absurd, at least to the lengths which the title character carries his impulse to "prefer not" to do anything. Also, the level of bureaucratic intransigence of Bartleby's colleagues also seems ridiculous, as they obsess over their fellow worker's refusal to endorse the practices of their offices by toiling away and useless endeavors. But Bartleby's tale illustrates the soul-crushing nature of modern life, and the purposeless of much of the paperwork that human beings are forced to plow through, simply to make a living. Bartleby wants out of the 'rat race,' and by seeing Bartleby's reaction, and the reaction of others to Bartleby's denial of the value of work and government regulation, the reader is able to see the more muted, but still absurd truths of his or her own life with greater clarity. Bartleby's decisions seem heroic on some level from a moral standpoint, because he refuses...

To read these texts from a sociological or historical point-of-view might bring different aspects of the text to light, such as the history of the civil rights movement or the creation of the American bureaucratic system of government or capitalism, but it is difficult to ignore the moral questions the characters grapple with that lie at the center of these texts. But unlike Jefferson's suggestion that these fictional texts must or should instruct, these tales show that fiction has a power that nonfiction lacks -- to raise moral questions that only the reader can answer, because in a fictional tale, the reader must fill in what happens after the end of the story, as real life will provide no answer.