Bartleby The Scrivener, And To Build A Fire

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Bernice Bobs Her Hair Works Cited Missing In F.Scott Fizgererald's 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' there are significant character changes noted throughout this short story. In this essay I will examine the development and representation of Bernice who is a central character. We can observe that her cousin Marjorie changes Bernice's personality from a quiet, passive person to someone full of confidence in society. We will also see how F.Scott Fitzgerald teaches us an important lesson about the insignificance of popularity.

Social competition is a very important central theme in the short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”. F. Scott Fitzgerald does an excellent job portraying social competition when it comes to females and competition between popularity and acceptance. Girls can be quite viscous and its quite evident in this short story; one example, in particular, is the competition between Bernice and Marjorie. Bernice and Marjorie engage in competition with each other over many things including; Fitting into society, the values of a woman, boys, and each other’s reputation. F Scott Fitzgerald’s short story becomes a ruthless competition of a “new woman” between two main characters. Who will win? You’ll just have to keep on reading…

Bartleby, the Scrivener, is a story written by Herman Mellvile. It is about a successful lawyer who hires a homeless, depressed man named Bartleby to transcribe documents for him. The narrator of this story is the lawyer. Throughout the story, Bartleby declines at his job, saying he would “prefer not” to perform his duties. Eventually, the lawyer learns about Bartleby’s homelessness by discovering he has been living in the office. After a while, the lawyer feels it would be best for the business to just move to a different office, so he does. To his surprise, Bartleby follows him there. Bartleby ends up getting arrested and eventually dies while in prison. This story has great meaning to it. The main character displays a great character of

F Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is another one of his more well-known works. This short story is the tale of Bernice, a young girl from the Midwest who is under increasing societal pressure to change. However, when she takes her changes too far it. The plot and the actions of the characters reveal the theme of the double-edged nature of change.

Paul has an obsession with the arts, which serve as either an outlet or cause for his individuality, while at the same time bringing a certain understanding about Paul's unique persona to the reader. Cather illustrates this obsession frequently; for example she writes: "It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman"(Pg. 3). However Paul's obsession with the arts is not necessarily healthy either, and serves almost as an addiction, as he has no desire to pursue a career in the arts. Although Paul seems to escape his daily struggle with conformity, and become lost in the dream world that these medias create for him, his desire to remain in a world of fantasy motivates him to lie and steal. This addiction is the reason Paul makes up stories in school about fantastic voyages he never takes, lying to his teachers, stealing money from "Denny & Carson's" (possibly a law firm?), and using the stolen money to pursue his fantasy: "what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere [around the music and arts], float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything."(Pg. 8) Even though Cather in some way justifies Paul's pursuit of his dreams through this addiction to the arts,

Ever since the invention of language, humans have been obsessed and intrigued with the aspect of storytelling. Each story, whether written or spoken, holds an important theme within its creative words and exciting plot. While each story is special and unique, over the course of history, different periods of literature have formed where authors tend to focus on similar themes and messages. One of which was the American Romantic era, where authors used their stories to challenge the boundaries of society, and delve deeper into what makes people inherently human, both the flaws and perfections. Some of America’s greatest works of literature were born in this period, like those of Poe, and Hawthorne. A very common literary theme during the romantic period was that of good versus evil, in both individual characters and society as a whole; this theme is especially evident in works such as The Tell Tale Heart, The Raven, and Young Goodman Brown.

Paul was never content with his house on Cordelia Street and was always dreaming about "movin' on up" while he worked at Carnegie Hall and watched the actors and actresses move about in their stately attire and live in the most luxurious of hotel suites. Because of this dream to get out of the area in which he lived, Paul hardly ever got along with his teachers and his father. The thought of taking full advantage of

It starts off as him being down and depressed in the meeting with the school, then he transitions to a high once he is at the gallery and hears the music at the theater. But once he leaves the theater and his true reality hits he goes back into his depression state. Finally, he arrives in New York and starts to live the life he thinks he was destined for. He buys silver from Tiffany’s, wines and dines at the hotel. This is the happiest we see Paul in the story.

Throughout much of Melville’s narrative in “Bartleby the Scrivener” we, through the eyes of the lawyer, really only view Bartleby as an enigmatic figure, an “other”, more so than a person. This comes to a head when the lawyer finds out on a Sunday morning that Bartleby has illegally taken up residence in his office, an act that would no doubt infuriate the average person. We are privy to the lawyer's thought process as his emotional response to the discovery evolves from pity to disgust. "...a prudential feeling began to steal over me. My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear,

A few years later Fitzgerald scribbled “Basis of Bernice” on the heading of the letter’s first page. These letters became the basis of the ten thousand-word story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, he drafted in 1919. Fitzgerald sent his story to numerous magazines yet was met with even more rejections. Many editors called it “cliché”, “boring” and trying to please them he cut his manuscript in half and scrapped the ending in hopes of

“It is no longer a request but a demand.” I insist as I try to keep all my rage out of my voice. I decided to try and reason with Bartleby, but that was simply not going to work.

Early twentieth century popular literature featuring strong, independent women as the main characters is few and far between. However, two influential American writers in particular, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill, wrote stories with women as central characters in their works, created in 1920 and 1921 respectively. In Fitzgerald’s essay, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, he describes the contentions between two fictional privileged high school girls. O’Neill’s play, “Anna Christie”, deals with the life of a former prostitute orphan attempting to find sanctuary as she reconvenes with her father and meets her fiancé. Both works depict women as multifaceted characters, though their main conflict stems from their desire to be longed for by men.

Morals are an essential part of the human psyche. In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” the scribe Bartleby works for a lawyer for a short period of time. During the time, the lawyer notices Bartleby’s odd characteristics which are similar to the characteristics of how lepers in The Bible are treated. In the short story, Melville infuses the story with symbols such as the Dead Letter Office and a key phrase that alludes to the narrator’s failure to answer the moral question that Bartleby presents of how lepers should be treated in society.

During a period of depression and eye problems from 1853-56, Melelville published a series of stories. Melville exploits Bartleby's infamous remark "I would prefer not to" to reflect his protesting attitude toward his meaningless job. Secondly, Melville gives attention to Bartleby's actions, and his constant coexistence with the inescapable wall. As a final method, Melville once more supplies you with Bartleby's actions involving his imprisonment and concluding suicide. It is through these three literary techniques of establishing character that Melville is able to constitute the idea that an insignificant job in a capitalistic society will produce an alienated worker. Herman Melville's, "Bartleby the

Short stories are mainly written to grab the reader’s attention and thus make them reflect and become drawn into the story even more. So why is a short story important? They are important and effective due to the fact that any reader can relate to the story or a particular character as they can be universal. In this TMA I will be tracing the elements of conflicts within the three short stories. These conflicts will consist of man vs man, man vs society and man vs nature. Furthermore, I will talk about the internal and external conflicts in the stories in the following paragraphs.