Similarities Between The Birthmark And Bartleby The Scrivener

Just because you’re a part of society doesn’t mean that society accepts you. In “Wakefield” and “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville, the main characters are all set apart from s the Dead Letter Office” Bartleby has had the life sucked out of him (Melville 41). Society because of their strange ideas and actions. The protagonists are all freaks because they don’t fit into societal norms. Everybody has to come from somewhere. All three protagonists lived a relatively normal life until the main conflict of their story. Aylmer was just a loving husband who had given up his career in science to spend his time with his wife, Georgiana. Likewise, Mr.Wakefield was also just a devoted husband, yet unlike Aylmer, Wakefield was stuck in a dead-end job. And Bartleby was only a hardworking scrivener, who “...did an extraordinary quantity of writing.” (Melville 11) However, it’s not really who they were in the beginning of the story that matters, it’s who they became to be. The

His dull and average life seemingly pushes him to the brink and makes him start wondering what the point of his existence is if he was “...the surest person to perform nothing today…” (Hawthorne 1). At a certain point even he was bored of himself, which is interesting because he can’t stand being the ideal guy. It makes the reader ask themselves why society sets these standards that make people miserable and unhappy. At the start of “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Bartleby already is miserable and unhappy. Though the narrator originally leads the reader to believe that this is because Bartleby works day and night with “...no pause for digestion” and hardly speaks to his co workers, it is because life has already worn him out (Melville 11). Just by working as “... a subordinate clerk inilarly to Mr.Wakefield, Bartleby has given up on being normal because being normal killed him