Bartleby The Scrivener Mental Illness

Each and everyday we see a variety of people with disabilities and or diseases. Do we see them for what they look like on the outside or what they feel on the inside? In the novel, Bartleby the Scrivener, it is never really explained why Bartleby is so strange. Back in the day, mental illness was not a known disability. I picked an exert from the story that explains how people with disorders were so disregarded. “What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach”. The narrator knew Baretleby was not ordinary and it pained it, not physically but mentally. In

Most people can manage without wearing glasses by squinting, moving up close to anything they want to see, and taking a taxi anywhere instead of driving yourself anywhere. People can accept that they will never be able to see anything clearly ever again, but why? Why try so hard to accomplish life when you can just place on a set of glasses? No one would ever recommend that a near-sighted person should just work harder. No one would say ‘Maybe that’s just your normal’ to somebody that needs glasses. They would probably say ‘Let’s go to the eye doctor and get you a prescription so that you are able to see again’. I think this is a good analogy because nobody thinks about mental illness like this. If you wear glasses, you literally need continuous use of a medical aid to experience the world like most individuals do. If it were anything besides glasses, that would be considered a disability. But needing glasses is a tremendously common, noticeable, and accepted form of disability to the point that we do not even consider it as one. We usually just accept that some people need glasses and that it is perfectly normal and there is nothing wrong with needing to rely on