Compare And Contrast Bartleby The Scrivener And The Flight Of Betsey Lane

Characters are very important to a story. They help to build up the interest of readers so that they want to continue reading. Many stories base their themes on how the characters act and what they do. A theme is a meaning or a point to the story, which the author wants you to get out of it. Two stories which utilize characters very well to build up theme are, "Bartleby the Scrivener," by Herman Melville, and "The Flight of Betsey Lane," by Sarah Orne Jewett. These two stories build the theme of individualism up with their unique characters in their stories. In each of these stories, they start out with intense descriptions of the characters. Each story describes the subtle but important difference between each character. However, with the main characters, differences are much more prominent. For example, in "Bartleby the Scrivener," one of the main characters, the narrator, whose name we never learn, is a "rather elderly man" who works as a
Betsey goes out and ventures by herself into the outside world. She is very courageous in that she would dare to go out by herself for long distances without a cane in the world. Women of that time and of her statue would never do what she did let alone having the courage to do so even if they could. Bartleby is also acts out of the rules of normal and does differently from other what would be deemed as a normal worker. He does not listen to the requests his boss makes and simply replies with "I prefer not to", every time (Melville 31). He even does strange things like starring himself when he is in jail and dies probably of hunger. Any normal person in his state would have broken down and ate and drunk instead of like him going outside into the jail yards and facing and starring at the wall (Melville 49). Therefore, both Betsey Lane and Bartleby have a side of them that differs greatly from other people and allows them to stand out in a