Bartleby The Scrivener

English 102 class examined different related and unrelated literatures which exposed many of the students to critical analysis of literature works. The literature works read include, “The Lottery”, “The Doll House”, “Amontillado”, and “Battleby the Scrivener”. These stories focused on the concepts of trust, traditional beliefs, love and hatred, jealousy, betrayal, revenge and murder. “The Lottery” and “A Doll House” show nature of human hypocrisy and influence of society on human behaviors. These stories are related as it show the hidden darkness of the human condition. In “The Lottery”, insincerity and reluctance of village elders to abolish inhumane practice by hiding under the concept of tradition was on display. In addition, fear of prosecution or being labelled as tradition abolitionist also prevented the villagers from challenging this status quo. Similarly in “A Doll House”, men were trapped by traditional gender roles, and fought hard to maintain patriarch society at all cost. They prevent women from assuming male responsibilities even when they incapacitated, as evidenced by behaviors of
In Batleby the scrivener, The character of Bartleby was a victim to an incurable case of passivity and unending acceptance. As a result of this, Bartleby appears to be constant victim of unhappiness and dullness. The readers learned through indirect characterization that the lawyer (narrator) tends to accept every set of circumstances thrown in his path without putting up any challenges. The lawyer is eventually depicted as being very similar to Battleby in the sense that both men lacked ambition and drive to pursue their happiness. In this vein, “Bartleby, the Scrivener “ story is draw a very similar correlation to the story of “The Lottery” because the villagers also feel indifference and did not challenge the rationality of the lottery