His first published story contains his most famous character?the freeloader, Japi, who belongs to a strange human species of incompatibles distinctive for their indisposition to activity and whose varieties might include Melville?s Bartleby, Beckett?s Murphy, and Walser?s ?divinely gifted layabout.? The freeloader exists at the edge of a group of impecunious, talkative young men with ambitions to become writers and artists and otherwise ?astound? the world. (They would seem to be the exact, if less cerebral, contemporaries of the undergraduate Stephen Dedalus and his fellow collegians. James Joyce was also born in 1882.) The freeloader has no ambitions. He admits, ?I?m not a poet and I?m not a nature-lover and I?m not an anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.? He passes his time wandering around and sampling the (to him) gratis pleasures of life: the feeling of rain, a slice of cake, a beach, a glass of jenever, a fine pair of yellow shoes. Mysteriously knowledgeable, rarely disagreeable, the freeloader excites friendship and envious curiosity even as he disregards the boundaries authorized by property and propriety:
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