5/9/2023 0 Comments Melville scrivener![]() ![]() He persisted, instead, in making his case for literature as a means to explore the period’s more vexing philosophical questions. But Melville was writing figuratively here, at a moment in his own career when he decided not to write the kind of fiction expected of him and not to fulfill the presumed duties of his profession. The stakes of each demanded task are not as clear and urgent as those in medicine. The story’s setting, for instance, is not clinical the central exchanges are between the head of a law office and an employee who politely but insistently refuses to carry out his understood duties. There are, of course, important differences between Melville’s approach to refusal and how we have come to discuss it in medical ethics. In 1853 Herman Melville published “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” his now most well-known piece of short fiction, which over a century and a half later we can certainly read as an illuminating dramatization of conscientious objection. ![]()
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