My name is Carl. I was born in 1984. This, 1984, was also the first canonized work of Literature I ever read. The book implied a lot of feelings about authority and individuality which I had struggled with throughout all of elementary school. The idea developed in my head that all great books must find some way to toy with whatever it is we cannot confront alone: as an individual, as a citizen, as a human, and in the case of Melville as a scrivener.