Compare And Contrast Bartleby The Scrivener

Zombies Yesterday, Zombies Tomorrow, Zombies Forever For every leading character in a story, there is something that acts against them. As with "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville and Zone One by Colson Whitehead, the main characters both face similar antagonists. Both set in New York City, these two pieces of literature share many parallels. But the biggest similarity they share is in the similarity in their antagonists characters. With both of these, the antagonist works to not only exemplify the negative traits of the main characters, but the positive attributes as well; giving the reader a true understanding of each person. In "Bartleby, the Scrivener", the narrator presents himself as a lazy man who does what he can to avoid confrontation. Even going so far as to say “I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (Melville 373). This description seems accurate from the beginning of the short story until just before the very end; where out of character for his laziness, though not in his evasion of confrontation, the narrator moves offices so that he does not have to deal with Bartleby. But even with this, the narrator comes across as a guy that while doing well …show more content…
Nay – if that were possible – he become still more of a fixture than before” (Melville 391), when it comes to the end of this story. He becomes just another thing to be dealt with on a daily basis for the narrator, as are the skels and stragglers in Zone one. For Mark Spitz, the stragglers are what remained behind and it is his job everyday to go find them and then kill them. They too have become just another fixture in this world that he is living in. For both Mark Spitz and the narrator, they have to develop their own ways of coping to deal with these new found