Herman Melville's Bartleby is a tale about a pallid, forlorn young man who is hired as a scrivener by the elderly, blithely cheerful employer-narrator. Bartleby disrupts the routine of the office when he 'prefers not to' engage in certain assigned tasks and upsets his employer greatly. Eventually, Bartleby dies a pathetic death in prison. Bollas sees the employer-narrator and Bartleby as two aspects of one psyche. Bartleby is the repudiated true self behind the cheerful façade of the executant self represented by the employer-narrator. In