The historic entanglement of the novel as a literary genre with the spread of modern discourses and practices makes novels an invaluable source. The modern discourses on work and the literary imagination of the Ottoman novels mutually reinforced the contemporary consensus on new ethical worlds, while establishing new forms of difference. This paper will explore how Ottoman novels described and prescribed new forms of subjectivity through the perspective of work ethos and productivity of the new self. The Ottoman reformist anxiety about Ottoman laziness as a social disease takes a different and multifaceted form in the novels of the reform period. By concentrating on Ahmed Midhat’s Karnaval (1881) and Mehmet Murat’s Turfanda mi Yoksa Turfa mi (1891), a few questions will be addressed. First, through these novels, how did the Ottoman literary practices articulate new conceptualizations of subjectivity in connection with the nation? The Ottoman novels constructed the ideal self by juxtaposing it to a new typology in the literary realm, the much ridiculed anti-hero zuppe. How do the novels that feature the zuppe character thematize the period’s preoccupation with work ethos in connection with character and nation building? Does ridicule serve a “function of preserving social norms,” or does it promote a new set of mores that have been increasingly ubiquitous in the social sphere? Contrary to earlier analyses, the zuppe was not a person who merely imitated. Just like the Ottoman novels, the character of the zuppe should not be imprisoned into an imitation-originality binary. The specifics of each novel they appear in withstanding, the zuppe characters indicate the establishment of difference. How does this difference, explored in the literary realm, resonate with the larger social and political anxieties of the Ottoman reform period? By creating a dandy-like idle figure as an anti-hero, the novelists not only articulated what was a social reality, but also disarticulated from it by prescribing a certain citizen type and ridiculing others before an audience they helped create by targeting them as interlocutors of their texts. The discussion should leave the preoccupation with wrong Westernization paradigm, and should address how articulation of new forms of subjectivity, embodied in the hard-working hero and the unproductive anti-hero, presented different models of modernities, political propositions, and anxieties.